David Frum has similar thoughts: Barack Obama’s lack of decisiveness in the financial crisis evokes memories of his response to the Georgian invasion. The financial crisis actually brings out two disturbing traits–one temperamental and the other ideological–in Barack Obama:

Crisis does not bring out the best in Barack Obama. His instinct is to equivocate and temporize. We saw that tendency in August, when the Russians invaded Georgia and Obama had to work through a gamut of soft-line stances before arriving at the same position that John McCain had announced immediately.

. . .

As we shift from crisis management to the tough work of devising a longer-term response to the mortgage debacle, we’ll be reminded of another big fact about Obama. He is a classic big-city welfare-state politician. He has lots of ideas about how to share wealth created by others—but very few about how to ensure that wealth is created in the first place.

The problem with someone who hasn’t accomplished anything in public office is that he doesn’t know how to accomplish anything in public office. It is an odd handicap for someone who wants government to do a lot.