Very Brief Assessment of Noda’s Performance

This is it. “[Noda]'s done a pretty good job, all things considered. He's done two very important things: set priorities, then stick to them. The Noda administration could have done a much better job of managing the restart process after it took over and it surely could have caved more quickly on the Article 3 Commission impasse, but some of the blame has to go to Edano, Hosono, and to a lesser extent their bureaucracies. It's also mostly missing in action on TPP, but I can totally understand the political need to underplay this while the other two priorities are yet to be settled. You could say that two years of reconciling the manifesto pot pourri and the exigencies of the coalition with reality set the table for prioritization while Hatoyama and Kan in their own ways made prioritization a necessity. Still, it could have been much, much worse. And the Noda administration now seems to be trending upwards even as it pushes restarts and tax hikes. He's giving the public something specific that it wants that is distinct from the actual policies that he pushes.” That’s it for now.