Mr. Obama, Please Return To Earth

Has the President lost his mind Listening to last night's speech, it sure seemed that way.

It's taken him five months and three tries to simply come up with a Commerce secretary.

But somehow over the next couple of years, he will reinvent how we do almost everything. How we bank and borrow. How we educate our children. How we cure cancer. How we use energy.

Even how we build cars.

Forget the ideological objections to Mr. Obama's ambitions. How about the practical difficulties How will Mr. Obama ever get all those things done

The answer is he won't and shouldn't even try. If Obama really wants a second term, he should devote his entire first term to making the economy strong again. And that's it.

Did you ever wonder why CEOs are always repeating the same old management cliches 'Focus, focus, focus.' 'The key is execution.' 'Do one thing, do it well.'

That's because businesses that don't do these things don't survive. They fail.

Unfortunately, governments that don't do these things, don't fail. They just waste lots of time and money, precisely what the Obama administration is now setting off to do.

Of course, with the stimulus bill, the president has shown that he can get bills quickly passed. But words are words. The hard part is turning them into specific constructive actions.

And nowhere is that harder than in Washington, amongst the grasping armies of politicians, lobbyists and bureaucrats.

Look at the travails of poor Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary.

He was dragged through an exhausting confirmation process. He can't hire qualified staff fast enough. And his undermanned Treasury now has to oversee trillions of dollars in taxpayer assets in Fannie and Freddie, AIG, Citi, scores of TARP banks and a bankrupt car industry.

Focus Are you kidding Between the meetings of the G7, the Presidential Auto Task Force, the cabinet and potential hires, it's a miracle if Geithner gets any sleep, much less accomplishes anything.

Now duplicate what's going on at the Treasury over at the 14 other cabinet-level executive departments and their huge bureaucracies in Washington.

How easy will it be for Department of Education honcho Arne Duncan to reinvent the U.S. education system Just think of the countless layers of federal, state and local school bureaucracies.

Even the Democrats in Washington don't agree on what to do. Note that Nancy Pelosi wasn't applauding last night when Obama lobbied for charter schools.

At least, somebody is running Education.

Obama is full steam ahead with a revolutionary overhaul of the U.S. health-care system, but hasn't even named a new Health and Human Services Secretary yet.

That's why Obama eventually will need to temporarily ditch some of his other first term 'priorities' like health-care reform or renewable energy.

Doing one thing exceptionally well requires making choices. And the president's overriding priority has to be on fixing the economy.

Anybody who has ever run a business instinctively understands this. It's hard enough to hire good people quickly and have them perform one task to a tight deadline. Give them lots of things to do and the work suffers.

Even on a small scale. The larger the scale, the harder it gets. And unfortunately, the U.S. government only knows how to operate on a large scale.

So now watch as all across the nation, hundreds of billions of dollars in funds are dispensed, ten of thousands of government workers and private contractors are hired, and thousands of new federal and state programs are initiated.

In Obama's world, this will all end with the revolutionary reinvention of America.

But back on Planet Earth, it will only end in tears.