The Gallup polling organization recently reported that a majority of Americans no longer believe that the government has a responsibility to ensure that all citizens receive health care. Three years ago, two thirds of those polled agreed with this statement; in the latest poll 47% agreed and 50% begged to differ.
This is bad news for the congressional effort to reform health care, but it’s part of a bigger story. Support for capital punishment in a recent Rasmussen poll hit 61%; public sentiment on abortion also seems to be drifting steadily to the right. In the middle of the biggest recession since World War Two, public attitudes toward labor unions have soured, and support for unions is at its lowest level since polling began. Public attitudes on gun control moved to the right in the last decade; gun control used to be a mainstream political cause, but it has now disappeared from the national agenda.
Meanwhile, public trust in key institutions continues to decline. The current Congress has an approval rating of only 21%, while 70% believed the press was actively supporting Barack Obama’s presidential campaign last year. The military still gets high marks, but that’s about it. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Most of my liberal friends were convinced that Obama’s election meant that the long nuclear winter of the Age of Reagan was over. We were supposed to be experiencing the liberal equivalent of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe as the hero figure of Aslan/Obama chased that awful witch away and brought us the spring.
But it now appears increasingly that American public opinion continues to move, basically, in what readers of Special Providence would recognize as a Jacksonian direction. Public opinion is more likely to support term limits for the House and Senate than to endorse sweeping new social programs and entitlements. People don’t want the government to engage in ambitious nation-building experiments overseas, but they do want it to kill bad guys – and they don’t want scruples over ‘political correctness’ or procedural safeguards to cripple efforts to protect us from fanatics at home. According to Pew pollsters, more than 70% of the public believes that the use of ‘torture’ against terrorists is justified under certain circumstances; 77% of independents share this view, as do 58% of Democrats polled.
Short term, this is a huge problem for some of the key items on the President’s agenda. According to a CNN survey, 64% of the public wants Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to be tried by a military, rather than a civilian court. Cap and trade looks toxic. The public’s attention for global warming is evaporating as it becomes more worried about jobs than the environment, aided by the conviction that a corrupt Congress is using big, complicated bills to spread the pork around while plunging the country into bankruptcy. Pew reported in October that over the last year the percentage of the public who believe that global warming is due to human activity has fallen from 47 to 36. And while 50% of those polled said they supported limits on carbon production, the more people knew about the issue the less they supported it. Add to this mix the perception that the Copenhagen summit will promise trillions of dollars over the next fifty years to exporting giants like India and China while raising costs for American manufacturers.
And when Congress is finished with this bill, it can turn to two more items on the White House ‘to-do’ list: comprehensive immigration reform and card-check for unions.
It looks increasingly clear that the President’s basic agenda runs directly counter to public opinion. It might still be possible to slow down dramatically and go for small victories in the hope that voters, liking what they see, will take another look at the big ticket items on his shopping list.
There is some sign that he’s looking in that direction; the administrations seems set to focus on deficit reduction rather than grand new plans in 2010. If nothing else, that should show how different the country is from the country Obama thought had elected him. Can anybody imagine Franklin Roosevelt vowing to cut government spending after his first year in office?
But will this be enough if the president continues to push legislative initiatives that the public doesn’t want? And how many Democratic legislators will put their seats on the line for an agenda that, quite possibly, will test even lower in the polls next year than it does now?
Recently I suggested that a world increasingly shaped by Asia is a world that favors ‘red state’ values. If the domestic political climate is also trending red, President Obama is going to have to spend a lot more time boning up on the life and thought of Grover Cleveland and William Clinton, two Democrats who led the country for eight years when the country’s instincts were well to the right of their party’s consensus.
Republicans, however, should keep their gloating under control. Jacksonians are instinctively hostile to big business and have been known to turn on the rich. Taxing the rich to fund social programs that help the middle class has perennial appeal; an AP poll released this morning suggests that voters think the best way to pay for the costs of health care reform is to do just that.