My friend Kevin McCullough offers some red meat in his weekly syndicated column by reversing the Rush controversy.  Forget what a radio talk show host wants; does Barack Obama want America to fail?  Does the new President want to use a series of crises to fundamentally change the nature of America?  Kevin thinks so:

President Obama knows the history of recessions and how Americans get out of them. He knows, for example, that if he gave back to the American family in just pure cash handouts what he is instead planning on taxing them (with interest) in the days to come, that the number would loom between $25,000-$65,000 per family, for every family in America.

But pretending to be doing something about the problem is only half the strategy for Obama. He truly intends to see socialized health care, and European styled labor agreements become reality in America. He knows the consequences of doing such things, he’s seen all the projections and what the outcomes would be, but he’s doing it anyway.

But there is one tiny problem standing in his way to getting there–“We The People!”

He knows that in order to be forced down paths that we don’t wish to go, the only way he gets us to change our mind is to create abject suffering and misery.

Then in Venezuelan styled cries for help, he can promise to take America to a better place economically, a place of greater care, a place of true serenity. A place like Venezuela.

I’m not sure I’d say that Obama wants America to fail, as much as I’d credit this to a belief that America had already failed.  Obama is a typical liberal ideologue who thinks that America has failed in the sense of equality of result.  He sees inequities and thinks that government exists to eliminate all of them.  My guess is that he’s aiming much more for France than Venezuela, but neither are particularly palatable destinations for a national economy.  Obama seems to see our entire 230-year history as a long crisis that his statist policies will end.

What we’re seeing is the policy playbook of the Left.  We predicted this all along, while the media hailed Obama as some sort of centrist without a shred of evidence for that.  He has a long history, though, of alliances with the Left, and it comes as no shock that Obama has shown his true colors in the first days of his presidency.  Massive government spending, reductions in defense, and preparation for nationalization of health care, banks, and other private industries fit well as a pattern with those policy goals.

Eventually, this agenda will sour Americans on Obama, and according to Rasmussen, that process may have already started.  His approval ratings have begun to slide, now at 56% after spending most of the last few months in the high 60s or above.  The difference between those who strongly approve and strongly disapprove has dropped to 8 points.  Obama has scored as high as 30 points on that measure, and its quick drop has to have a few people at the White House wondering how much farther Obama can afford to go.  Bill Clinton lost Congress in his first mid-terms even while remaining personally popular, and the GOP will have a good shot of at least winning back the House.

Kevin and I will talk more about this on today’s Ed Morrissey Show at 3 pm ET.