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The president can’t really believe that he will accomplish everything he talked about in his speech to Congress last week. It was overly ambitious, it skated over the shocking debt we’re creating – but it also was inspirational, which is something we need right about now.

We’re spending madly while hoping to cut the budget deficit. This is some high-wire act, and it would be nice to watch from the bleachers instead of being part of the show, seated in a little chair atop a tall pole. But who knows, there might be a way to keep our balance.

Rather than being nuts, President Obama might be going for the “reach should exceed grasp” approach. Not everything pans out, but the effort itself puts us on a new course.

We’ll probably never really decide, once and for all, whether this is a country for self-reliant risk-takers only, or a place where the strong get immensely rich and then always – or usually – reach back and care for the weak.

For now, the pendulum is way over on the left, and it will pause there for a while. This is an era of not just big government spending, but scary-big government spending, and the only way it works is if predictions about the returns on our investment come true. Given the history of predictions, that’s asking a lot.

At this point in our drama – it’s unclear which act we’re in – here’s where things stand:

• The Republicans are right when they say the Democrats threw all kinds of pet projects into the stimulus bill. When you tell a group of lawmakers how much you’re willing to spend and hand them a blank piece of paper to list their ideas, don’t expect a refund. You’re lucky if they don’t ask for a second piece of paper.

• The Democrats are right, however, to take an aggressive approach. We’re blindfolded in a burning house, but at least we’re trying to feel our way to safety. A hopeful example of how things might work: Central Iowa real estate folks tell us that as soon as the tax break for homebuyers was announced, business picked up.

• “Nationalizing” the banks is a disturbing thought, but there’s reason to believe it could work.

The federal government took an 80 percent stake in Continental Illinois National Bank in 1984 and retained ownership for 10 years until selling to Bank of America Corp. As far as we know, during those 10 years, nobody placed a portrait of Karl Marx in the bank lobby.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized IndyMac Bank last summer, worked on cleaning it up, and in January a group of former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. employees made a deal to buy it.

Reuters reported that one of the group’s members, J. Christopher Flowers, said “low-life grave dancers like me” could make a fortune from the financial crisis.

According to the report, Flowers said: “Governments everywhere – this government and around the world – are going to own a lot of stuff, and they are going to be not very adroit, not very commercial. There’s going to be a lot of money to be made around the edges of this thing.”

Not the kind of sentiment we chisel into stone at our business schools, but he has a point. A golden age for cashing in on other people’s misfortunes has commenced.

• It’s also a boom time for offering radical ideas. We’ve heard suggestions for a bank for bad assets, new banks for good assets only, closing the bad banks and merging their assets into existing good banks, bulldozing excess homes, and sending big checks directly to American citizens. If only we knew which ones to choose.

As one of his Indian scouts said to Gen. George Armstrong Custer on the morning of June 25, 1876, “Today we go home by a trail we do not know.”

Sounds like our situation. With a little luck, “home” has a different meaning this time.