Public Not Sold on Big Government Policies (Michael Barone)

RealClearPolitics.com ^ | 7/9/2009 | Michael Barone

[SonOfDarkSkies]

The financial system collapsed. Housing prices cratered. Unemployment is at a record high for the last quarter-century. The Democratic president has a solidly positive job rating.

And yet we Americans have not suddenly become collectivists. The economic distress of the 1930s led Americans to favor less reliance on markets and more on government. The economic distress of the 1970s led Americans to favor less reliance on government and more on markets. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect, as many political liberals have been predicting, that the economic distress of the late 2000s will produce a shift in the 1930s direction. But it doesn't seem to have happened yet.

[SonOfDarkSkies]

The Democratic president has a solidly positive job rating.

Well...if -8 is positive!;-)

[St. Louis Conservative]

Michael Barone is the best of the best when it comes to reading the political tea leaves.

[jessduntno]

So, in other words, our society is falling apart? Duh....

[skully]

And polling suggested that Americans by the late 1930s had become wary of the New Deal.

FDR's contemporaries new his domestic policy was crap. He gets more credit for ending the great depression through rewritten history then he deserves. It's his handling of the war where he deserves the most credit. His economic policies have gotten a coattail effect from that in the rewritten history.

[Zechariah_8_13]

FDR made the depression worse. Only the war turned things around.

[JSDude1]

And it’s not going to, people are more educated now, and they can see the results of socialism!..