Barone: The President who Fell to Earth from the Sky

Michael Barone reviews the latest polling on Barack Obama and his policies, and comes to the consensus opinion that the honeymoon has ended.  Despite his high personal ratings after five months on the job, Obama has increasing resistance to the policies he’s championed.  Overall, Obama’s biggest problem is that people don’t trust government — and he may not be helping matters.  Barone points to the following indicators, among others:

● 69% say they have a great deal or quite a bit of concern about government ownership of General Motors and a 56%-35% majority opposes government aid to General Motors in return for a share of its stock

● 58% say the president and Congress should concentrate on keeping the budget deficit down, even if it takes longer for the economy to recover

● by a 52%-41% margin they prefer reducing the budget deficit to stimulating the economy

● only 30% think Obama has developed a clear plan for dealing with the budget deficit, while 60% believe he hasn’t

His conclusion?  Get ready for political turbulence:

These results suggest a larger point, that despite the financial crisis and current economic distress, there has not been a drastic shift in American voters’ views of the balance between the market and government. The economic failures of the 1930s and successes of the 1940s convinced Americans to trust government more and markets less; the economic failures of the 1970s and successes of the 1980s convinced Americans to trust markets more and government less. These results show that American voters remain suspicious of centralized government power over the private sector and that they have great unease about the enormous far-larger-than-Bush’s budget deficits which experts project the Obama programs will produce.

If Obama’s big-government solutions succeed, then that would change this dynamic, a bet Obama will clearly lose.  The $800 billion Porkulus has not deflected the upward trajectory of unemployment in the slightest, despite his economic team’s worthless projections in January.  Obama himself now admits that unemployment will blow into double digits this summer, when he promised that the stimulus package would prevent it from rising to 8.8%.  That will not build confidence in big-government solutions.

Health-care reform and cap-and-trade are two other areas where Obama risks credibility.  It doesn’t take a math whiz or an economist to know that spending as much as $4 trillion to overhaul the private market health care sector seems rather stupid while the government faces an entitlement crisis in Medicare.  Most people will wonder why reform doesn’t start by fixing the government-run portion of the industry first.  As people learn more about the costs and implications of government control of energy production, they will wonder why this big-government push exists to impose a plan that will kill economic growth in the short, medium, and long terms.

Obama’s ratings were always going to come down to reality, and this is exactly what has happened.  If he continues to roll the dice on big government — and loses — expect those ratings to come down a lot more, even the personal ratings.

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