I'm a bit late on linking to this, but Paul Krugman is right to suggest that the Obama folks are going to need a bit of that goo-goo -- that is to say, "good government" -- magic if they're to pull off this recovery plan. The fundamental dilemma for liberals now, as Stan Greenberg has argued in this magazine, is that Americans are in favor of our solutions, but skeptical of government's ability to carry them out.
People want government to get serious about addressing the challenges we face as a country. Huge majorities want the government to be more involved in a range of issues including national security, health care, energy, and the environment. To tackle global warming, two-thirds of Americans support stronger regulation of business. When it comes to health care, the results are dramatic. By a two-to-one margin, people opt for a universal health care system rather than separate reforms dealing with problems one at a time. A majority even goes so far as to say it's time to establish a Canadian-style health care system.[...]But there is a perverse consequence brought about by the scale of conservatives' failure. The problem -- the very substantial problem -- is that conservatives have failed in ways that have undermined Americans' sense of collective capacity. Their failure has communicated not just their own incompetence, but also the message that government in general is incompetent. By failing so dramatically, conservatives have created a significant roadblock for Democrats: They have undermined people's faith in the very instrument that we as progressives want to use to solve problems.The scale of damage done to people's belief in government is enormous. The results of a February study we conducted for Democracy Corps that assessed people's attitudes toward government stunned us. By 57 percent to 29 percent, Americans believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life instead of helping people. Sixty-two percent in a Pew study said they believe elected officials don't care what people like them think, and the same number believe that whenever something is run by the government it is probably inefficient and wasteful. The Democracy Corps study found that an emphatic 83 percent say that if the government had more money, it would waste it rather than spend it well. The government receives a job approval rating of more than 50 percent on only one issue -- national security. On nearly every other issue, a majority of Americans disapprove of government's performance.
It's a real problem. Americans feel caught between the venality of private sector conservatism and the incompetence of public sector liberalism. As Krugman says, that's a problem. "The Obama team faces political opponents who will seize on any signs of corruption or abuse — or invent them, if necessary — in an attempt to discredit the administration's program." You see it beginning already, with Mitch McConnell warning that Democrats want to blow a trillion dollars "without safeguards, without appropriate hearings to scrutinize how tax dollars are being spent." Obama has said that he wants to make government cool. That would be nice. But for now, I'd settle for trustworthy.
