Calm down, lib­er­als. Take a deep breath. I know that trust­ing your elected offi­cials and being skep­ti­cal of the press feels alien and wrong, but times have changed. It’s really okay. Ease down. You’ve blown the transaxle, you’re just grind­ing metal.

I woke up this morn­ing to a cacoph­ony of Chicken Lit­tling about the pos­si­bil­ity that Obama might not roll back the Bush tax cuts! OMG! How could he do such a thing?

Well, if you slow down and read the fine print, he didn’t. Here’s what he actu­ally said.

“Whether that’s done through repeal, or whether that’s done because the Bush tax cuts are not renewed, is some­thing that my eco­nomic team will be pro­vid­ing me a rec­om­men­da­tion on.”

So the ques­tion here is whether the tax cuts for the wealthy are repealed in 2009 or allowed to expire on their own in 2011. And he’s not say­ing he won’t repeal them, just that all options are on the table to be con­sid­ered along with the rest of our eco­nomic pol­icy. That doesn’t sound as scary. It actu­ally sounds kind of, you know, rational.

I’ve seen this hap­pen almost daily since the elec­tion. The media, and their audi­ence, is so used to every­thing going to hell sans hand­bas­ket that they imme­di­ately jump to the worst pos­si­ble con­se­quence of any­thing com­ing out of Wash­ing­ton. But the new guy is such a fun­da­men­tal change from the smirk­ing chimp cur­rently occu­py­ing the Oval Office that this approach doesn’t make sense any­more. I find myself in the dis­tinctly uncom­fort­able place (no, not the back­seat of a Volk­swa­gen) of hav­ing to trust the politi­cians and be skep­ti­cal of the press. Because every time I’ve seen this hap­pen, it sounds hor­ri­ble until I actu­ally read what Obama said and say, “Oh, well, that sounds okay.”

It really does come down to trust. I trust Barack Obama to be smarter than me and do the right thing. I’ve trusted Bush for eight years to be dumber than me and try to screw me over, but that dif­fer­ent. I know that Barack Obama knows every­thing about pol­i­tics that I know, plus a lot that I don’t know, even stuff, with apolo­gies to Rummy, that I don’t know I don’t know. And I trust him to weigh all of that against itself and make the right call for our long term pros­per­ity and security.

And the key to that is “long term.” Pol­i­tics is the sci­ence (and art) of com­pro­mise, and if we want the changes we get in an Obama admin­is­tra­tion to endure, a sim­ple numeric major­ity in Con­gress isn’t enough. We need Repub­li­cans who might, even though it looks more dubi­ous with every Sarah Palin photo op, be back in charge some­day to have some sense of own­er­ship over these changes.

Think about this like a chess grand­mas­ter, look­ing sev­eral moves ahead. Obama knows that his­tor­i­cally, our econ­omy has tanked after every tax cut on the rich and rose after every tax hike on the rich. But he also knows that we’re going to be run­ning a seri­ous deficit for at least most of his first term as we try to spend our way out of this reces­sion (the only proven way to get out of a reces­sion), so the money lost to the Bush tax cuts between 2009 and 2011 is just a fac­tor in the size of the deficit, not the cause of one. So if he extends this poten­tial olive branch to the Repub­li­cans (and their super-​rich con­stituents), does that grant some Repub­li­cans the polit­i­cal cover they need to step across the aisle and pass uni­ver­sal health­care or a new New Deal to rebuild our crum­bling infrastructure?

So stay calm, trust that Obama has his eye on the big pic­ture, and don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s going to be okay. Ratio­nal adults are in charge now, give them room to do their jobs.