Obama taking over the Presidency is like whomever becomes the next General Manager of the Detroit Lions.

On the plus side, you inherit a winless team with dishearthened fans who will treat even the slightest improvement like Indiana Jones finding the Holy Grail – Starving fans who will drool for the White Castle you provide as if Wolfgang Puck himself conjured it.

On the minus, the team you get is in a tremendous pit – you have 20 holes to fill on the roster and only 7 draft picks and a few million in salary to stop the gaps. You know going into the first season that you cannot in any way cure every ill in less than 24 months and may not be able to cure some of those problems period.

On the plus side, the job is still a position of respect and power with an organization that, dating back, has a long history of success and pride despite recent failures.

On the minus side, if you pull a 2-14 in the first season you’ll catch heat for stuff that was broken long before you arrived.  It’s like moving into a frat house before the Pinto and Flounder’s breakage walk-thru.

On the plus side, you are given freedom to make whatever wholesale modifications are needed even if the team has never gone that direction in the past and there is no proof your moves will actual better the situation – because people want to trust the mystique of the New Guy.

On the minus, if you try wholesale changes and they rapidly turn south you’ll be the butt of late-night television jokes that mock the very characteristics that formerly were considered ‘endearing’, ‘quirky’ or ‘eccentric’.

It’s a good gig – if you can bring home even a marginal winner.  And if you cannot – it will bring you down faster than a sack of rocks in the river.

One has to wonder if this is a good time or a bad time to be the President of the United States.

On the plus side, besides being a position of fantastic respect, power and prestige, you can hardly do worse than the perception of the previous administration.  Unless the USA shuts down the stock market or Mexico invades and takes back the Alamo, just about any decision will, in the short term, be viewed as better than the decision that preceeded it.

On the negative side, the economy is in trouble, loans and mortages need years of fixing, the USA’s reputation around the world has gone from innovation to insult comic and any transition has a slow period of adjustment at the beginning.

Up first, the US needs to improve it’s world-wide image so expect the “Joe Biden 74 country world goodwill tour” to start around Valentine’s Day. Russia?  I’m looking at you.

After that Congress will probably move to improve the poverty level by raising the minimum wage which will have either a good or bad effect on small business and I don’t know which. 

Also, freezing housing closures for 3 months won’t bail us out of the logjam that is a ton of people who signed up for loans they couldn’t afford after we made a bad system that allowed it to happen.  Just cos the gov’t held up the noose and invited folks to stick their heads into it doesn’t mean either side is without blame.

As for the war – the battle has not been in Iraq, not should it have been, for several years.  Find where we need to go, do what we need to do, then do it.  And, for variety, actually listen to the field officers who tell us how to handle the problem. The sooner the troops vacate that country, the better.

It could be a great time to be Potus – if everything works you are hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread (mmm, bread) but if nothing works you take the blame even if the mess was a hand-me-down from your undisciplined older brother.

Vote for either candidate but please vote.  Not voting isn’t avoiding making a bad choice, it’s not making a choice at all.  Even if you dislike all of your choices on an issue, surely one or more of the choices is not as bad as the others.  Be educated, be involved.