Nile Gardiner
Telegraph [UK]
27 September 2011
• 49% of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. In 2003, less than a third (30%) believed this.
These figures pose huge problems for Barack Obama ahead of the presidential election in November 2012. Obama’s declining presidency has become synonymous with the image of big government, from spiralling budget deficits and out of control federal spending to massive taxpayer funded bailouts and increasing regulations on businesses and healthcare. Even 28 per cent of Democrats agree with the 61 per cent of Republicans (and 57 per cent of independents) who now view the federal government as “a threat” to the rights and freedoms of the American people. It is little wonder that a mere 11 per cent of US voters now describe themselves as liberal on fiscal issues in Rasmussen polling, compared to 44 per cent who call themselves conservative and 40 per cent who describe themselves as moderate.
The United States is undergoing one of the biggest political revolutions in its post-war history, and perhaps the most important since Ronald Reagan, with an emphatic rejection of the idea that government knows best when it comes to handling key domestic issues, especially relating to the economy. President Obama, whose administration has practically worshipped at the trough of big government, looks spectacularly out of touch with a clear majority of the American people. The highly interventionist liberal experiment of the last two and a half years has been a spectacular failure, with 14 million Americans out of work, sliding consumer confidence, collapsing house prices, and falling stock markets.
This is why Barack Obama could well end up being the last big government president of the United States, a nation that simply cannot afford the lavish excesses of an imperious presidency that drains the pay-checks of hard-working Americans with impunity and reckless abandon…
Read the entire article at The Telegraph.
