Email | Print    Type Size  -  +  President's perilous balancing
act   By Nina Easton, Washington Editor February 25, 2009: 10:48
AM ET  WASHINGTON (Fortune) -- It's true: He didn't break it.
But now he owns it.  With President Obama's three major (and
expensive) salvage plans in place, we can apply a version of the
Pottery Barn rule that Colin Powell made famous in his warning
about invading Iraq. Obama now has a controlling ownership stake
in this economy and how it performs.  And so, last night, we
heard more up-talk, less gloom.  "We will rebuild, we will
recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger
than before," Obama declared just minutes into his joint address
to Congress Tuesday. It was a talking point released early to
the media and designed to shape headline coverage of Obama's
historic first speech on the state of the union (though it
wasn't technically a state of the union address).  Those remarks
stand in sharp contrast to Obama's earlier stated argument that
the economic spiral