Lawrence J.

Haas

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November 17, 2008

Obama: Make Us Feel Better

Here’s a startling figure: Even at a time of deep public anxiety about our economy and financial system, 80 percent of Americans are concerned that “the government is getting too involved in the private economy,” according to a new survey by the respected Rasmussen Reports.

This figure reflects two realities. First, Americans’ traditional concerns about the size of government, dating to the colonial period, are clashing with Washington’s eye-popping spending of late to bail out teetering institutions – and requests for more bailouts from automakers, states, big cities and others.

Second, after decades of post-Great Society government-bashing, particularly in recent years of Republican rule, Americans are deeply cynical about government. Just 17 percent of them trust government to do the right thing most or all of the time, according to an October New York Times/CBS poll.

Americans’ leeriness about government is the backdrop to an intra-Democratic debate about how aggressively President-elect Obama should deploy the federal government to revive the economy and pursue his other goals – with one side pushing a New Deal-style approach and the other promoting a step-by-step, incremental approach.

That debate, however important, misses the more crucial key to Obama’s success in the coming years – whether Americans feel tangible, positive effects from his program in terms of their living standards and hopes for the future. The better Americans feel, the less they will agonize over how they got there.

Among Democratic insiders, where you stand on the New Deal vs. incremental debate is largely shaped by how you interpret Election ’08. Those pushing the former approach tend to think November 4 signaled the revival of liberalism and arrival of a new “center-left” U.S. majority mindset. Those pushing incrementalism tend to think it largely signaled wholesale rejection of failed Republican leadership and a longing for “change” of almost any kind.

With a cover sketch of Obama as a latter-day FDR, Time magazine announced the arrival of “The New Liberal Order,” arguing that “The Obama presidency is just the beginning . . . [S]hifting attitudes about government could make Democrats the ruling party for a generation.”

Meanwhile, Democracy Corps and Campaign for America’s Future – the former a polling operation, the latter an advocacy organization – asserted that Obama “spearheaded a sea change election. It marks the end of the conservative era that has dominated our politics since 1980 and the beginning of a new era of progressive reform, driven by an emerging progressive majority.”

More specifically, the organizations said, Obama’s victory reflected support for the progressive agenda on which he ran – quality health care for all, higher taxes for the rich and tax cuts for the middle, investment particularly in clean energy sources, and trade and labor-related items.

Maybe. But 2009, when Obama takes office, will not be 1933, when FDR launched the New Deal.  Roosevelt inherited a far smaller government on which to build than will Obama and, even with the obvious economic suffering of today, we simply are nowhere near another Great Depression.

Nor will it be 1965, when President Johnson promoted his Great Society. LBJ inherited a small budget deficit, allowing federal expansion without risk of long-term economic harm – a far cry from today when deficits are dangerously high and are slated to rise even more no matter what Obama does.

The Rasmussen result with which we started – that fourth-fifths of Americans worry about government’s role in the economy – provides an important warning about Democratic overreach.  Public rejection of President’s Clinton’s big-government health care overhaul during the most recent era of all-Democratic government provides still another.

So Obama and the incoming Democratic Congress need to move in concert with public opinion, nourishing the comfort of average Americans with the pace and scope of federal activity.

Beyond style, however, here’s what really matters: Will it work? Thus, the question is not merely whether an all-Democratic government enacts laws and imposes regulations. It is whether, and how quickly, federal actions improve the living conditions of a broad cross-section of Americans.

During the deep 1981-82 recession, President Reagan seemed unlikely to win re-election. By 1984, with the economy roaring and Americans’ feeling a renewed sense of direction, he won in a landslide.

After the 1994 mid-term elections, when Americans repudiated Clinton by giving the GOP control of Congress, Clinton seemed even more politically vulnerable. Two years later, again with a roaring economy and rising living standards, he won a second term handily.

Can Obama pave his own path to substantive success and, then, re-election? That depends on just how deep the economy sinks in the coming months and how long it takes to climb out of what Obama calls “the hole that George Bush dug.”

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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