The Problem

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Chris Matthews with the Washington Post’s Dan Balz:

Matthews: It’s manifest he hasn’t done the “big thing” yet, at least not that anybody can see. But do you believe it’s also true the public doesn’t want the “big thing” right now in terms of liberal legislation.

Dan Balz: Chris, a year ago I asked him the question of what the ’08 election really meant. Did it bring an ened to the reagan era. he said, “not necessarily” that there was still a skepticims to top down, command and control government. He thought that was a lasting legacy.

He said the challenge was for smart, effective government whether that was big and small. I think that’s the question that he’s trying to convince people that he’s got an answer to and after a year of his administration, there’s a great deal of skepticim on the public’s part that he’s found the right answer.

John “Drudge Rules our World” Harris added that the public is far angrier at government than at the Banks.

It was clear during the campaign that Obama was reluctant to confront the Reagan legacy on its basic terms, preferring to dryly characterize his governing philosophy as technocratic and competent. I think that was a mistake, since people really have no other framework within which to understand their problems, when things go badly, they have no other way of underastandingf it except for blaming “big government” for either causing it or failing to fix it.

Today, they may be angry at the banks, but they see the problem being that the government gave these institutions preferential treatment over them rather than that they caused this worldwide economic crisis with their irresponsible, swashbuckling, gambling culture — which now must be regulated by the government. I think most people see the recession, the banking crisis, unemployment and the rest as only a failure of government — and they are assuming that the way to fix it is by making government smaller. After all, both Democrats and Republicans keep telling them that it’s so.

I’m very glad to see that Obama is finally taking some action against the banks. It is the Democrats’ best hope of reframing the debate, although I think it’s awfully late in the game. Today, he seemed to sideline Geithner and Summers publicly, but the question is whether or not he’s finally figured out that they are part of the problem, not the solution.

I don’t think Obama’s words alone have enough credibility anymore to fix this. He’s going to have to take some concrete action.

And Democrats are going to have to accept that need to attack the Reagan legacy more directly and make an affirmative case for government. I would have thought that was obvious, but the Democratic party and Obama himself seem to have believed otherwise. If they persist with merely tweaking the Reagan legacy, they will find themselves in this same situation over and over again. As long as people see government as the problem, progressivism, liberalism, whatever you want to call it, will fail.

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