“If you want to talk about long-term growth, you have to talk about policies that are familiar. ... Obama’s speech was, in a sense, the equivalent of saying that if you want to lose weight, you need to eat better and exercise more. And demanding that he offer up some “big, bold, and new” idea (as [Dana] Milbank, for instance, did) is like asking for a fad diet—lose thirty pounds in thirty days while eating only muffins!”

-- James Surowiecki, “Obama's Economic Speech: Boring is Not Bad,” on the New Yorker site

See also: Alex Pareene, “Beltway hacks Cilizza and Milbank solve the economy!” on Salon.com.