We don’t want to be France!

The following I agree with:

Doug Schoen, a Democratic strategist and pollster who worked for President Bil Clintonfor six years, said that should Mr. Obama win next month, he should not mistake his electio for a mandate for sharply higher taxes on the wealthy or major government expansion. “The polling I’ve done shows that people are anti-Republican, not pro-left, not pro- redistribution,” he said. “They’re ever more skeptical of Washington.”

For example, in the poll by CBS News released earlier this week, 44 percent of Americans said businesses now faced “too much” or “the right amount” of regulation, compared to 43 percent who said they faced too little. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll in September, 42 percent said Mr. Bush’s tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, should be made permanent, while 36 percent said they should be allowed to expire over the next several years.

Most strikingly, 34 percent described themselves as conservative, compared to only 20 percent as liberal. Those figures have hardly changed since September 2000, when 32 percent described themselves as conservative and 20 percent as liberal.

... Jeffrey Garten, a professor at the Yale School of Management who was an undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, said lawmakers are likely to impose stricter regulatory oversight on several industries — especially financial companies and markets. 

... “I’m scared about the next year but I’m very optimistic we’ll come out of this in good shape,” he said. “We very well may come out of this horrible situation with a better version of American capitalism — it’ll be a little tamer; it’ll be a little more regulated.”

“But this country is built on an appetite for risk,” he added. “We don’t want to be France.”