The TSA's new procedures are the kind of big government I don't like, and I'd like to see them changed. I'm not so naive that I'm not aware that polls show most Americans are willing to sacrifice a tangible amount of freedom for an uncertain improvement in security.
Today Matt Bai offers a piece regurgitating the conservative conventional wisdom on the whole mess:
In this way, the “Don't touch my junk” fiasco raises, yet again, what has become the central theme of Mr. Obama's presidency: America's faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work. From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled — blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry.
I actually agree with Bai that Obama's effort to show government can work has been hampered, not by the TSA but by the administration's failure to engineer a robust economic recovery. While that matters, the fact is that while Americans love to talk about how much they hate big government in the abstract, even the Tea Partiers tell pollsters how much they love their Medicare and Social Security. That American politics might be more complex than a "big government vs. small government" dichotomy doesn't occur to him.
So it is with the body scanner/pat down story. Poll after poll shows majorities agreeing that the loss of freedom is "worth it," although the frisks rate worse than the body scanner. Bai could easily have written a piece about how the widespread, and in my view, misplaced support for the new measures is evidence of how much Americans' trust in government has grown under Obama. That would have been nonsense, but it only would have sounded silly because it isn't a watered down version of what Republicans want you to think.
