This has been a challenging year, hasn't it?

Of course, most of us expected it to be challenging in light of what happened in September of last year. But most of us also came into the year with high hopes.

The country was facing a terminal case of Bush Fatigue (term limits on presidents was a very good idea; eight years really is long enough) and most of us were happy to welcome somebody new to the White House.

Somebody very new. Whatever your party affiliation, I would like to think that most Americans were proud to witness a true Moment in U.S. history, when our first African-American president was sworn into office.

I don't know about you but I never for an instant thought that would happen during my lifetime.

There are those who would say that it all went downhill from there. Some of them have problems with our new President on basics of political philosophy, while others were simply disappointed when they discovered that Mr. Obama really couldn't part the Potomac with a wave of his hand.

From a practical point of view, I have grown increasingly encouraged as the year has progressed.

Early on, everybody in Washington was preoccupied with preventing our entire financial market system — the capital system behind ‘capitalism' — from crashing and burning. That left very little time, energy or focus for small or microbusinesses.

Even now, the Obama Administration is principally concerned with the fact that banks are not lending to small firms. Which makes me wonder if he knows that they were lending much to microbusinesses anyway, even before the crisis?

But President Obama has articulated on more than one occasion recently that small businesses are central to his economic strategy. Whether or not that is true will be even more evident when we see what he does and what he is paying attention to once all the economic fires have been put out.

It's been awhile since I heard anybody talking about a "middle class agenda" and that's too bad. The middle class is still waiting — aren't we?

The MicroEnterprise Journal will be on hiatus over the final two weeks of the year. The next issue of the newsletter will be published on January 4, 2010. I wish you a joyous, peaceful and very merry holiday season! DRB