George W. Bush bequeathed to the nation the legacy of two decades of economic policy in the spirit of laissez faire and an ill-conceived major war without visible end.

To try to provide some focus on the economic mess, it is useful to separate the immediate from the longer term, and the real from the financial. Two issues — unemployment and fixing the financial system — stand out.

As an aside, it is bad enough that on the economic side the genuine problems are severe, but the difficulties are compounded by politics. First, there is the eagerness of entertainers, such as Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, working toward an audience and higher ratings, to happily exploit ignorance and the lower side of man's nature. The result helps to block effective public policy and polarize the system. Second, there is the willingness of Republicans to sacrifice their souls to do anything to make the Democrats fail.

By doing all that they can to sensationalize their programs, Limbaugh/Beck join the extreme right to try to destroy the very legitimacy of Obama as president. They undermine the political fundamentals of democratic society and go to the very edge of encouraging active revolt and physical violence. Republican leaders seem pleased by the benefits of their performances.

But back on the issues, the immediate problem is unquestionably unemployment. Unemployment is crucial because in addition to the personal hardship of the families involved, many other social problems melt away when employment is high, not to mention the effect on the debt and deficit.

The policy for recovery seems to lie between continuing the present anemic stimulus, which will string recovery (and hardship) out over many years, or a stimulus roughly double the $800 billion already allotted, to deal with unemployment in as few years as possible. Krugman and Stiglitz vote for the latter. The benefits of higher employment and a quicker economic recovery easily trump the relatively small increases to the deficit.

On the financial side, Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Carter administration, is one of the few voices on the Obama team calling for a return to pre-1999 conditions that separated the two banking functions of investment and ordinary everyday business banking. It was the tearing down of this wall that opened the door to the go-go years that followed.

Obama's inner group, probably led by Larry Summers, is pushing a policy that has the pretense of regulation. He wants to maintain present law but find new ones that would prevent the kind of speculation that led to the recent disaster, a highly improbable, if not impossible, task, given the inventiveness of bankers.

And then there is the even more unlikely difficulty of finding an administrator appropriately ideologically tuned and capable of applying the new regulations. The final, and probably fatal, hurdle would be the Roberts court, which would love to rule on Democratic legislation.

Obama's diffidence on both issues and even on the public option for health care is difficult to reconcile with the soaring rhetoric that was so inspirational in his campaign speeches.

Harry Cook is a retired professor of economics. He taught at Southern Oregon University from 1966 to 1986.