Even if you have no philosophical objection to President Obama?s policy proposals, you might be taken aback by the pace with which he and his administration are moving forward.

If so, you?ll appreciate this passage from John Podhoretz?s editor?s note in the latest Commentary:

The only people in America who are moving ahead heedlessly and without regard to the terrible economic uncertainty that has gripped us are the leaders of the Obama administration and their acolytes. Throughout 2009, they have removed relentlessly, accumulating unprecedented levels of public debt, nationalizing the auto industry, setting salary levels at banks, and pushing a health-care package that will require the imposition of huge tax increases on the middle class.

Before the economic meltdown, only the most radically minded leftist would have believed that a severe downturn was the proper moment to be forcing through a cascade of new imposts, onerous regulations, and a massive increase in the size of the public sector. Had Barack Obama inherited a booming economy, his effort to push one or two of these major changes in the relation between the citizenry and the government could have been easily defended as an appropriate use of national wealth. But all of them at once? He would have been criticized, properly, and by some members of his own party, for endangering the nation?s prosperity.

Now that America seems less prosperous, it is even more astonishing that this should be the course Obama has set.