There have been several miscues by the Obama team since Election Day, not that you'll hear too much about them in the press. The Richardson nomination falling apart, the handling of the Blago investigation, the Geithner nomination, the new lobbying rules followed quickly by the issuing of waivers for those who didn't meet the criteria, all these might have done some real damage to a president who wasn't taking office under such "historic" conditions, i.e. being the first black president and assuming office in the midst of a frightening economic contraction. In the event, Obama has had little trouble staying above the fray and has continued to receive adulatory coverage much as he did throughout the campaign. All of these early gaffes have been covered -- certainly no one believes that Obama helped himself by nominating someone who doesn't pay his taxes for the job of Treasury Secretary -- but not too extensively, and none has left a mark. Still, other Obama mistakes have been almost completely obscured by the reality of his victory and the fawning coverage of it. Everybody involved in a winning campaign looks like a genius when it's all over, but of course there are always mistakes. I think it's obvious that one of the mistakes made by the Obama campaign was its compulsion to spell out policy on hot-button issues on its campaign website. This led to numerous moments of embarrassment, as when the campaign distanced itself from Obama's call for direct, presidential diplomacy with Iran only to have critics note that the website stated clearly that the candidate supported such a policy. Another example was the language the Obama website used to discuss the surge, language that later had to be tweaked to acknowledge the success of U.S. forces, and Obama's error in opposing the plan. These were not suspend-the-campaign size mistakes, but they were unforced errors that would not have been repeated had the media been only slightly more even-handed in covering the contest -- and slightly less inclined to portray every innovation on the part of the Obama campaign as though it represented a revolution in democracy. The Obama folks were very clever, but the value of the website they created didn't come from the superficial discussion of policy it offered -- instead those policy statements become an unnecessary burden on a campaign that occasionally required flexibility. For some reason, this model has now been adapted to the website of the White House. There has already been some quibbling with this or that section of the website, but the real problems will come in six months to a year when language gets changed, whole sections disappear, and events trump campaign rhetoric. The campaign is over -- the thirty-word policy prescriptions should have died with it.