Now that would be change! Gwynne Dyer in the Daily Gleaner:

U.S. president-elect Barack Obama inherits the in-box from hell, but an all-points crisis like the present one also creates opportunities for radical change that do not exist in more normal times.

As Rahm Emanuel, his newly appointed chief of staff, put it: "Never waste a crisis."

Is Obama clever enough and radical enough to seize those opportunities?

For example, he has promised to shut down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

While he's at it, why not hand the whole U.S. military base at Guantanamo back to the Cubans?

Guantanamo has absolutely no military purpose; Washington has only hung on to it for all these decades to annoy the Cuban regime.

If the U.S. wanted to bomb Cuba, it would do it from Florida. If it wanted to invade, it would land Marines on beaches elsewhere, not march them into the teeth of the Cuban defences around Guantanamo.

Besides, the goal should not be to fight the Cuban Communist regime, but to smother it with love.

After half a century in power the Castro brothers are nearing the end of the road. What better way to signal the end of the confrontation with the United States that has kept the Communists in power for so long than to evacuate the only foreign military base on Cuban territory?

In normal times, a decision to pull out of Guantanamo would stir up a months-long storm in the U.S. media.

Right now, it would be a two-day story that cost Obama almost no political capital.

Opportunities for this sort of low-cost action that clear old obstacles away now abound, and it would be a shame to miss them.

At some point, the fantasy of an administration that's all about "change" and "vision" is going to collide with the reality that the only candidates on offer were both calculating centrists, one slightly to the left of the other, who ran a more vicious campaign.

Of course, the collision might produce an FDR-like figure, instead of a trainwreck; the hour produces the man, and sometimes people do rise to the occasion, even Democrats.

If I see that, I'll be the first to, well, bake a chocolate hat and chown down.

In the meantime, Dyer gives plenty of other "pragmatic" examples of what real change would look like; go read.