The end of audacity?

How could it be that in times of distress, Americans want less government rather than more? Here's a simple notion that the stuffed shirts in Washington still don't get: If you don't know how to balance a budget, and you keep adding trillions of debt to a troubled economy, why should I trust you with my money? And worse, when you do spend the money, most of it goes to bail out the fat cats who help you get elected rather than to helping us. Nina Easton of Time magazine weighs in on this counter-intuitive trend: people are more open to big government in good times rather than in bad-- which certainly doesn't augur well for an activist administration.

When Obama took office, conventional wisdom held that the American people, jarred by a financial crisis they were routinely told was "the worst since the Great Depression," would race into the protective arms of Washington. After all, the Federal Government had given us the New Deal in the worst of times and a patchwork of economic safety nets since. The idea is that we instinctively turn to its beneficent hand to ease the pain of hurricanes, floods, tornadoes--and recessions.
Yet in today's hard economic times, something startling began showing up in public-opinion polls: fewer people than in the past wanted Washington to step in. In the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, only 23% of respondents said they trust the government "always or most of the time"--the smallest proportion in 12 years. The percentage of voters who think government should "do more to solve problems and meet the needs of people" has dropped 5 points since Obama's first weeks in office, while that of those who think government should leave more things "to businesses" rose 8 points. The shift is especially noticeable among independent voters, a small plurality of whom wanted government to "do more" after Obama took office; now--by a margin of 17--they think government does "too much."
"Audacity" was a catchy campaign theme, but it's less attractive as a governing principle. The all-important swing voters who decide elections are nervous about dramatic expansions of the Federal Government--even and especially in this time of economic distress. As it turns out, this financial crisis was not the call to bold action that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said shouldn't "go to waste." Quite the opposite: if he doesn't want his presidency to be held hostage by a string of nail-biter votes in Congress, Obama needs to recognize that he overestimated the public's appetite for taxpayer-funded solutions.