THEY DON'T WANT HIM TO BE A REALIST IN ECONOMICS, JUST A rEALIST IN FOREIGN POLICY:

Obama finds solid ground on tax-cut plan (National Post, January 07, 2009)

This is the weird new world we live in: It looks as though president-elect Barack Obama, a solidly left-wing Democrat from whom many observers were expecting a new New Deal, is going to end up offering Americans one of the largest tax cuts in their history. According to Monday's Wall Street Journal, Mr. Obama and the congressional Democrats are hoping to find bipartisan ground by giving US$300-billion, or nearly 40% of a planned $775B stimulus package, back to American taxpayers over the next two years. This would roughly equal the combined up-front impact of President Bush's two tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.

Partly, Mr. Obama is bowing to the preference of Republicans for a "starve-the-beast" strategy that focuses on economic growth rather than lavish new spending programs. But partly, he is just recognizing the facts of life. As William Gale of the liberal Brookings Institution told the WSJ, there has been a great deal of debate over stimulus spending in the United States, but in the end, "it was hard to figure out how they were going to spend all that money in intelligent ways, so it makes sense to do more on the tax side."