One year down

A month before he was inaugurated, Barack Obama said he did not believe his victory marked an abrupt end to the skepticism about top-down government and social engineering ushered in by President Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 -- he merely demurred that he thought it was a start.

"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," he said on that day in December 2008.

As Mr. Obama marks the first anniversary of his inauguration on Wednesday -- the day after Democrats in Massachusetts bungled away Ted Kennedy's Senate seat -- the president may be close to receiving his answer.

In fact, it turns out Americans' skepticism about a big and powerful central government dates not to 1980 but rather to 1775. Meantime -- far from being "less interested in whether we have big government " and "more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government" -- the Obama Democrats have demonstrated in one short year that you can erect the biggest, most wasteful government in the history of the planet, and produce nothing but a pathetic echo of the unproductive, enervating, jobless welfare state last seen on the banks of the Volga.

According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, President Obama's personal approval rating stands at 53 percent, with 44 percent disapproving.

"The poll also shows 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," The Post reports. "By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services."

Mr. Obama admits he has failed to ease political polarization. "What I haven't been able to do in the midst of this crisis is bring the country together in a way that we had done in the inauguration," he told People magazine recently.

Really? By taking his slim electoral victory of 2008 and using it to push the "Express mail" version of the most radical leftist agenda seen in Washington since 1964 Mr. Obama has failed to "bring the country together"?

What a shock.

Next up: Punitive taxes on those who generate carbon dioxide; lots more taxes on any of "the rich" who haven't yet wised up and moved their wealth offshore; and union membership for all, whether they vote for it or not.

Beneath all the smooth talk, give Barack Obama credit for one thing: He's pushing on with his agenda to finish the conversion of America into a high-tax, paralyzed leftist economy on the model of Western Europe, where people are so resigned to collapse and decay that their birth rates have fallen below replacement levels.

Either Americans will give up and go along or the Democrats will pay the price come November.

May we live in interesting times.