Obama sold the country a false prospectus of easy, obvious, and almost painless change. The usual six honeymoon months have elapsed, and the country is nearly through rejoicing at the consolation that they have a president whom foreigners are unlikely to throw shoes at, and who speaks in sentences.

But his own Environmental Protection Agency director acknowledges that his cap-and-trade bill will have no effect on the climate, and it will neither raise revenue nor reduce carbon use. It must be replaced with a straight carbon tax of bearable impact coupled with sensible conservation, and alternate-energy-source and oil-exploration incentives. The bill that limped through the House of Representatives was a Rube Goldberg contraption of Al Gore myths and Congressional vote-buying boondoggles. Its adoption would be a disaster. The president’s claim of putting millions of Americans to work making wind-mills and solar panels is a fable that extends the frontiers of quixotry.

Only a fantastic, unstimulating, stimulus package, a Christmas-come-early tree on which the Democratic committee chairmen in the Pelosi-fied Congress hung their baubles of permanent reelection goodies, has resulted. And now the public is wary. There are many versions of universal medical care floating in different committees in the Congress. (Canadians should note that the Canadian health care system is being held up by both parties as a model of what not to do.) After nearly 45 years of advocacy, Senator Ted Kennedy’s venerable proposal has been exposed as hideously expensive and of no benefit to half of those who are not now insured.

It has been a rocky start. All depends on whether the president is sufficiently flexible to recognize and adjust to changing political facts. There is time and need for much intelligent legislation, and Americans like their presidents to succeed. But he can’t raise his poll numbers any more by hand-catching house-flies on television. The time for ponderous daily speeches has passed, and the time to take hold and govern has come, and the best quarter of the mandate has already been spent with little to show for it.