People who didn’t vote for Barack Obama will hoot how obvious it was to them, and should have been to their Obama-ga-ga friends, that he was always a stalking horse for a steroidal government. Maybe so, but there’s a lot of political complexity in 129 million votes.
For many voters, he appeared to be the Most Reasonable Man in politics. Obama enveloped and absorbed them. He could articulate an opponent’s point of view better than they could themselves. He knew, and that made people think their beliefs would always have a seat at his table.
He was moralistic, too. He made his agenda sound like a moral imperative. This worked. People here are attracted to a moral argument. The Rev. Wright mess could have been fatal. That he floated away from it with a grand moral speech on race in America bespoke a kind of unique personal magic. People thought they hadn’t seen anyone like Barack Obama stand for high office in a long time, so they voted for him.
But some are falling off the train. The president’s approval rating has dropped close to 50% from just over 60%. It’s early in a presidency to be dropping fast toward 50. Part of this is health care, but something else is going on here.
Big as the health-care proposal is, the White House might have gotten it easily as a standalone piece of legislation, given the congressional majorities and Obama’s reservoir of goodwill. But health care arrived in late May as a trillion-pound federal elephant in an Obama house that was looking like a Noah’s ark of every known species of federal spending: the $800 billion public-works stimulus, the deficit-busting $3.5 trillion budget (and now Treasury’s Tim Geithner wants Congress to lift the debt limit above $12.1 trillion), the grandiose cap-and-trade bill that foundered when Democratic coal states rebelled, the U.S. engulfment of the auto industry, the tax time bombs.
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