Bush learned the hard way that running government as a perpetual crisis machine leads to bad policy and public fatigue. Obama’s insistence on taking advantage of a crisis to push through every item on the progressive checklist right now is threatening to complete that cycle within his first year.

What are his options? First, stop doing harm. Throwing money all over the economy (and especially to sectors that match up with Democratic interests) is the shortest path to what Margaret Thatcher described as the inherent flaw in socialism: Eventually you run out of other people’s money…

Which leads to the second point: Stop it with the magical realism already.

Save terms such as “fiscal responsibility” for policies that at least minimally resemble that notion. Don’t pretend that a budget that doubles the national debt in five years and triples it in 10 is the work of politicians tackling “the difficult choices.” Americans have a pretty good (if slow-to-activate) B.S. detector, and the more you mislead them now, the worse they’ll punish you later. Toward that end, producing real transparency instead of broken promises is the first step toward building credibility.