I have to admit that I’m really impressed with President Obama. Not only does he seem like a genuine and real human being, more in touch with normal people than any of those other guys in Washington, I’m impressed with his ability to keep his promises and get things done.

With lightning speed, Obama is steering the enormous, cumbersome ship that is America in a completely new direction. The stimulus bill, Guantanamo Bay, making the banks accountable, investing in renewable energy, mass transit, and the list goes on.

In the period before his inauguration, while he was still President-Elect, many progressive voices were already criticizing Obama for retreating from some of the principles that fueled his campaign. Other voices told us to hold our horses, lower our expectations – after all, Washington is Washington, and there is a limit to how much you can get done in American politics.

But Obama is a sharp guy, with plenty of smart people around him. For anyone who has doubts about this, or wants a bit of insight into the way his mind works, read this extensive interview that the President gave to five newspaper columnists recently.

Here’s what he had to say, for example, about a topic that particularly interests me:

“I think right now we don’t do a lot of effective planning at the regional level when it comes to transportation. That’s hugely inefficient. Not only does it probably consume more money in terms of getting projects done, but it also ends up creating traffic patterns, for example, that are really hugely wasteful when it comes to energy use.

If we can start building in more incentives for more effective planning at the local level, that’s not just good transportation policy, it’s good energy policy. So we’ll be working with transportation committees to see if we can move in that direction.

The idea of an infrastructure bank I think make sense — the idea that we get engineers, and not just elected officials, involved in thinking about and planning how we’re spending these dollars.”

But it’s not just that Obama is a sharp guy with the right priorities. He knows how to carry on a dialogue with his opponents – when to engage them, and when to expose the weaknesses in their rhetoric. For example, consider a few lines of his address to Congress last night. About 35 minutes into his speech, he said this:

“With the deficit we inherited, the cost of the crisis we face and the long term challenges we must meet, it has never been more important to ensure that, as our economy recovers, we do what it takes to bring this deficit down. That is critical.

Yesterday I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office. My administration has also begun to go line by line through the federal budget, in order to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs…

We have already identified two trillion dollars in savings over the next decade. In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work, and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them. We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use. We will root out the waste and fraud and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier. We will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.

In order to save our children from a future of debt, we will also end the tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans.”

By vowing to reverse No Child Left Behind, subsidies for agribusiness, no-bid contracts, unnecessary defense spending and tax cuts for the rich, Obama was responding to Republican calls for “smaller government.” By cutting back on Bush programs, he told them, we can save trillions – answering conservatives whose attacks have been based on the argument that Obama’s policies will saddle America with heavy debts for generations.

He went on to talk about comprehensive health care and social security reforms, acknowledging the full costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget, and ending torture and the war in Iraq.

The President also praised a couple of Obama-era American heroes: a bank president from Miami who shared his $60 million bonus with hundreds of current and former employees because “it didn’t feel right” to keep it for himself, a town in Kansas that was destroyed by a tornado and is now rebuilding itself according to the principles of sustainability, and a little girl from South Carolina who wrote a letter asking Congress to help her dilapidated school.

Understandably, the majority of Republicans in the chamber did not participate in the frequent standing ovations during the hour-long speech. Many of them appeared to be reading newspapers during the address.

The Republicans’ strategic response thus far has been to repeat the same old message (fiscal conservatism, faith in the market, small government, etc.), while presenting it to Americans via a more diverse and multi-racial front of spokespeople.

But Obama doesn’t seem concerned. He’s got the public behind him, as well as Congress. It’s amazing to see how the US government can actually function, when it wants to. What a stark contrast to, say, the government’s response after Hurricane Katrina.

And speaking of the Bush gang, has anyone heard anything from them lately? Seems like Bush and his buddies are laying low these days, waiting to see how well the new crowd can clean up the mess they left them.

Perhaps, with any luck, we will soon forget all about that shady band of scoundrels altogether.

Images via whitehouse.gov and BBC.