The failure of liberalism right before your eyes

David Paul Kuhn:

Democrats lived down the Great Society's excesses for decades. Yet today's Democrats appear unable to even get basic liberalism right. A historic progressive moment has passed. The cost is millions of jobs and over the long term, the perception of liberalism's efficacy.

Barack Obama inherited a progressive moment unseen since Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt before him. In this crisis, liberals had a chance to prove Ronald Reagan wrong.

"This was a great turning point in history, the end of the conservative era. Conservatism imploded just as it imploded during the Hoover years," said Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University. "That opened up an opportunity for real progressive change in America and I think Obama has missed the moment."

The story is the stimulus package. The Bush-Obama rescues of the financial sector were reactive, overly broad and blunt weapons to prevent the really bad. They were soft on Wall Street but ultimately averted the economic panics of old. The stimulus was a different beast. It was Democrats' first big chance in decades to position government to affirmatively promote good, the keystone principle of active state liberalism from Lincoln to both Roosevelts to LBJ. Thereafter, the recovery of liberal thought was invested in the economic recovery act.

"If we don't act, a bad situation will become dramatically worse," Obama said of the stimulus bill in early February. "Crisis could turn into catastrophe."
Nearly nine months later, the stimulus has proven unable to turn the unemployment tide.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently reported that the stimulus generated between 600,000 and 1.6 million jobs. It lowered the nation's unemployment rate between 0.3 and 0.9 percentage points. Significant, but not exactly "catastrophe" avoiding. At best, as of now, the stimulus has cost $491,875 per job created. Meanwhile, the nation still languishes in double-digit unemployment.

The Democratic leadership let the stimulus morph into a buffet of poorly targeted spending. "The public face of the stimulus package has been the worker in a hard hat," as the Associated Press reported last summer. But in reality, the AP reported, most of the roughly $300 billion in state dollars was to go to social services-two-thirds to the health care sector alone. Yet the month before the stimulus passed, health care was the only major sector to add jobs.

The public has noticed. Only 7 percent of Americans believe the stimulus has created jobs, a recent CBS News poll found. Almost half of adults remain hopeful. But as we've seen this year, political expectations can quickly sour.

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There is more.

Voters are getting set to reject liberalism big time in 2010. Its utter failure as demonstrated by the "stimulus" package and the attempt to offer control freak rationed health care has become too obvious to ignore.