Ross’s take on Obama’s speech is worth pondering:
Obama was fantastic – worlds better than his inaugural. He laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda of any Democratic President since LBJ, and did it so smoothly that you’d think he was just selling an incremental center-left pragmatism. I think that he has an acute sense – more acute than most people in Washington, probably – of just how much running room is open in front of him at the moment, and he intends to make the absolute most of it. Burkean temperament or no, this was not a Burkean speech by any stretch: It was the speech of a man seeking to turn a moment of crisis into a domestic-policy revolution, and oozing confidence from every pore along the way. Now all he has to do is find a way to pay for it …
But Burke was famously not against all radical change (American independence, anyone?) – and the Burkean question about Obama is whether the crises we are all confronting require or demand a seismic shift, to keep the American ship afloat. I have felt a deep ambivalence about this since one of my first posts absorbing what Obama meant. But I have to say, as the 
depth of the corruption of the last decade or so is revealed in so many places, I find myself increasingly persuaded by Obama that now may be the time for real government action.
Here are my concerns: a moneyed elite whose estrangement from the center of American life, proved by their obscene indifference to minimal propriety (go get ’em, Maureen), has destabilized the critical middle of American polity, and begun to feed a cynicism about government that is corrosive of democracy; a culture of debt that has pervaded public and private America that bespeaks deep contempt for future generations; a physical infrastructure that is in obvious disrepair; an empire that seems to be running on auto-pilot, which keeps adding new provinces, with no way to sustain them in the long run; a healthcare system that seems to have built up as much waste as innovation and as much bureaucracy as the worst form of socialized medicine; an energy policy that keeps us in hock to Arab dictators and abuses our responsibility to be careful stewards of God’s creation.
Do I worry that government will over-reach? You bet I do. Is my instinct and inclination to do less than Obama plans? You bet it is. Am I nonetheless aware that the problems we face – cultural and well as political – might be ameliorated by a more active government prepared to address practical problems constructively and boldly? Yes. Reagan, one recalls, supported FDR at the time. And one suspects that the next appropriate time for a reformist conservatism will come after the Obama era – as a way to correct its inevitable excesses.
The Dish 