With all the good will that greeted Barack Obama's historic election as president, he assumed office at the end of a long period of decline in the public's confidence in its government. And he knew it.
Dan Balz, a reporter for the Washington Post wrote this in 2010:
A month before he was inaugurated, Barack Obama pinpointed one of the biggest challenges he would face as president. Could he restore confidence in government, even as he was proposing the biggest federal intervention in the domestic economy in a generation?
At the time, Obama said he did not think his victory marked an abrupt end to the skepticism ushered in by President Ronald Reagan toward top-down government and social engineering by Washington.
Balz went on to quote then President-elect Obama in 2008 as follows:
What we don't know yet is whether my administration and this next generation of leadership is going to be able to hew to a new, more pragmatic approach that is less interested in whether we have big government or small government; they're more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government.
We now have clear evidence that the answer to President Obama's second question is a resounding "Yes." And the answer to his first question is an even more resounding "No." Americans continue to want smaller, more pragmatic, effective government, but they do not believe they are getting it from the Obama administration.
Paradoxically, the Obama presidency has succeeded in reminding the public of the virtues of what the president promised, but didn't deliver — prudent, pragmatic, effective government. In what must certainly count as one of the chief ironies of the Obama administration, Balz reported that a 2010 Washington Post-ABC News poll "[S]hows how much ground Obama has lost during his first year of trying to convince the public that more government is the answer to the country's problems. By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services. Since he won the Democratic nomination in June 2008, the margin between those favoring smaller over larger government has moved in Post-ABC polls from five points to 20 points."
One term into the Obama administration, the president had not moved that level of support for smaller government much. As of August 2012, the figures were 56 percent favoring smaller government and fewer services to 38 percent favoring larger government and more services.
President Obama came into office promising to deliver non-ideological, bipartisan, pragmatic, and smart solutions to the public's economic, social, and political problems. The verdict on those promises is already in.
Looking back on the president's promises from the vantage point of 2013, Dan Balz concluded in an article entitled "Obama's trust-in-government deficit", that "President Obama has failed to meet one of the most important goals he set out when he was first elected, which was to demonstrate that activist government could also be smart government."
The president may have truly believed that this was possible. He may have truly believed that he alone, among all modern presidents, could succeed in this effort, where others like Lyndon Johnson had failed. He might have believed bias in favor of incremental change built into the American political system was an impediment to his transformational ambitions, and it was. And, he may have believed that his party's liberal wing, ascendant in Congress, could design and implement an effective and well-working major transformation of the American health care system solely reflecting their own policy assumptions and preferences.
These presidential beliefs are themselves immoderate, as well as personally and politically imprudent.
But the president promised more than moderate, pragmatic, and effective policies. He also promised that he would "rein in what he and other Democrats charged were frequent overreaches of executive authority by George W. Bush's administration."
We could trust President Obama and his administration with vast power, he said, because he would not misuse it.
That promise now stands revealed as a false or failed one, with direct and obvious implications for the Senate's comprehensive immigration bill.
Next: Trust the Obama Administration on Immigration? Caveat Emptor