Proving him right? Under President Obama, public trust in the federal government has fallen to lows that Ronald Reagan could only dream of. (
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The United States doesn’t only have an economic crisis on its hands. It has a political crisis, a crisis of popular legitimacy.
Gallup released a poll on Monday in which government ranked dead last in a list of 25 “business sectors,” with a favorability rating of 17 percent — below both real estate and oil and gas.
Sixty-three percent view government negatively. As the pollsters note, “The positive and the negative ratings for the federal government this year are the worst since Gallup began measuring its image in 2003.”
Everyone has a villain. Conservatives and Republicans believe President Obama has overspent, overreached and overplayed the hand he was dealt in the 2008 election.
Liberals and Democrats (Obama chief among them) believe Republican recalcitrance and conservatives’ relentless attacks on Obama have rendered our system “broken.”
Independents? As ever, they reserve the right to declare a pox on both.
This catastrophic decline in the general opinion of government did not begin with Obama, nor with the the Bush administration’s mishandling of Iraq and Katrina. To a large extent, it is the story of the last half-century of American politics.
The 1960s began with John F. Kennedy’s exhortation that the American people should not ask “what your country can do for you” but rather “what you can do for your country.” In the two decades that followed, the issue was not what the American people asked of themselves but what was asked of them by their county.
They were asked — compelled, in millions of cases — to fight in a bloody war the generals had no idea how to win and no idea what victory would mean. They were asked — compelled, in the cases of millions of urbanites — to use their children as part of a social-engineering experiment called “busing.”
They saw their taxes rise and inflation eat away at the raises they received to pay for their higher taxes. They saw the country grow crime-riddled and drug-addled, and their neighborhoods invaded by purveyors of pornography.
And in all these cases, the authorities that had insisted they had to do all sorts of things “for your country” seemed unable to do much, if anything, for them.
Thus came the rise of Ronald Reagan, who began his presidency in 1981 with the clarion statement: “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Barack Obama came into office in 2009 with an almost explicit determination to consign Reagan’s words to the ash heap of history. In our present crisis, government would be the solution.
Government stimulus, both through spending and the printing of money, would bring the country out of recession and back into growth. Government would partly nationalize the automobile industry to get it back on its feet.
And Obama spent a year forcing a government health-care takeover through Congress.
In 17 months, Obama’s policies committed the federal government to more than $2 trillion in new spending — some immediate, some over time. And the result is that we are either in a double-dip recession or very close to one.
This would seem not to bury Ronald Reagan’s 1981 summary of the conservative case but to elevate it to new levels. And the Gallup poll would seem to support it as well.
Except that a great many people who now view the federal government as broken think it hasn’t done too much in the age of Obama but rather that it has done too little.
They believe Obama’s stimulus was too small, that the deal to preserve the Bush tax cuts for two years was a craven capitulation and that his inability to get a tax increase out of the debt-ceiling crisis was an infamy.
They also think he was prevented by the evil Joe Lieberman from creating the “public option” that might have led to a single-payer health-care system, that he should have just nationalized the banks and used the Justice Department to send Wall Street bankers and billionaire private-jet owners to jail.
Where do Obama and Democrats go from here? They are the party of government. Nobody likes government, not even those who think the key question people should be asking is “what your country can do for you.”
What possible case can they make for themselves now?