Hope Street Group has likened our pressing national challenges - particularly around the recovery legislation - to "fixing the car while driving it," an evocative metaphor underscoring the somewhat counterintuitive nature of such a feat.

Blogging at Huffington Post, Hope Street Group leader and contributor Hoyt Hilsman picks up on the thread of our recent statement and expounds on the imperative to see the long-term forest for the short-term trees.

The challenge of "fixing a car while we're driving it" is to make sure that we don't let the economy crash, while at the same time making the fundamental repairs necessary to keep it running well into the future. And while there is no good reason to delay passage of an economic stimulus package -- which would send the economy into a ditch -- we need to make room in the package has the kind of long-term reconstructive features that will lead to jobs and other kinds of economic opportunities for all Americans well into the future.

So where do we go from here? Nothing about this process is going to be easy - that's the bad news. The good news is that we appear to have leadership that isn't afraid to tackle something this tough and far-reaching, even in the face of a true crisis. That's the kind of foresight we'll need to achieve true and lasting economic opportunity.