Barack Obama – Rockstar Unplugged

The spirit of the times runs a twisting course in America. A clear majority (59 percent) of Americans approve of firing corporate managers whose companies can’t succeed without the government playing wet nurse to them. Score one for Barack Obama, who fired one of the least competent corporate bosses ever, Rick Wagoner. On the other hand, Americans remain very skeptical of government. Two thirds of them don’t believe the “feds” would be better auto industry managers than those already at GM or Ford.

All across America, the rage over greed and excess engulfs the nation the poet Heinrich Heine once scolded, saying, “Worldly profit is their true religion and money is their God, their one and only almighty God.” But anti-capitalism? The voice of the people doesn’t cry out for a messiah called government. With a view to the just-completed G20 summit in London, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed believe that the decisions of U.S. entrepreneurs will help economic growth far more than anything suggested by the heads of state who met there. Support for a huge European-style social state? Eighty percent (!) don’t want Obama to tinker with the middle class tax breaks enacted by George W. Bush. Nearly half strongly disapprove of the coming $3.6 trillion budget.

No wonder. Since the official start of the crisis, signaled by the collapse of the House of Lehman, the Treasury and Federal Reserve have either doled out or made available $12.8 trillion. That’s nearly equal to the entire 2008 U.S. Gross Domestic Product of $14.3 trillion. That, in turn, equates to a new debt level of $42,000 for every man, woman, and child in America – just $6,000 less than the average annual income.

Republican Senator Tom Coburn, although a friend of Obama’s, can no longer remain silent. Obama’s budget, he wrote in RealClearPolitics, is the greatest “shift toward collectivism and away from capitalism in the history of our republic.” The electorate doesn’t see it in such black and white terms yet. Still, professional pulse-takers are seeing the smallest margin between those who “mainly approve” (35 percent) and “mainly disapprove” (32 percent) of Obama’s policies thus far recorded. The difference at the outset of his term was 30 percent. Eighty percent currently worry about the deficit and inflation.

We’re looking at the American version of our Merkel-Problem. As is well known, Germans like Frau Merkel more than they like her party. The Americans like President Obama more than his program, which 82 percent fear might not work. And overseas, they still love the rock star who played the Berlin Victory Column; after his press conference in London, the journalists (as incredible as it may seem) gave Obama a standing ovation.

Back home, however, the ice on which Obama has cut such perfect figures is getting thinner. Not too thin yet, but thinner. Instinctively, we think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was re-elected in 1936 and 1940, despite the fact that he couldn’t tame the Great Depression. It took a World War in 1942 to accomplish that. But Obama doesn’t have that much time, as evidenced by his approval numbers after less than 100 days in office.