How much is too much in the Oval Office?

Is Obama taking on too much at once, at economy's expense?

That is what this article is asking.

Andrew S. Grove, the former chief executive officer of Intel Corp. who's now a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, wrote an urgent appeal to Obama to focus on fixing the banks for last Wednesday's Washington Post:

"We have gone through months of chaos experimenting with ways to introduce stability into our financial system. The goals were to allow the financial institutions to do their jobs and to develop confidence in them. I believe by now, the people are eager for the administration to rein in chaos. But this is not happening.

"Until the administration does this, we should not embark on attempting to fix another major part of the economy," Grove wrote.

Obama and his aides say that he can, and must, do it all. They see him as a Franklin D. Roosevelt, confronting an emergency with a New Deal-like smorgasbord of government programs. If there's a problem, they say, it's getting Congress to keep up.

Republicans intend to obstruct Obama's agenda.

"It's time to focus on the emergency that we have in front of us," said Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, his party's leader in the House of Representatives. "Can we really be talking about (the global warming) proposal or a government takeover of our health care system while our economy is collapsing?"

Republicans fear that Obama will use the combination of an economic emergency and big Democratic majorities in Congress to ram through a liberal agenda.

It's not just Republicans who are worried about the breadth of Obama's agenda, though.

William Galston, a top adviser in Democrat Bill Clinton's White House, noted that Carter, like Obama, thought it critical to enact his entire agenda as soon as possible when he took office in 1977.

"Everybody has warned me not to take on too many projects so early in the administration," Carter wrote in his diary. "But it's almost impossible for me to delay something that I see needs to be done."

Yet by the end of the year, most of his agenda was stalled.

Today, Galston notes in an essay for The New Republic, Obama appears unable to restore confidence in the financial system, arguably the key problem preventing economic recovery.

The comparison in behavior to Carter could be a ray of hope against too much future damage. Though I am unable to take too much hope to heart when it comes to this administation.