If you compare the Carter malaise with the Obama debt doomsday machine, any GOP 2012 presidential candidate should sail to victory with greater facility than Ronald Reagan did in 1980. But will she or he? I am optimistic but also believe that in making his economic case, the Republican candidate will have different challenges because of the ongoing growth of our welfare state and the attitudes it has ushered in, along with heightened class warfare.

We could be seeing a paradigm shift in the way people view their social compact with government. More and more people believe that government exists not just to perform essential services as delimited in the Constitution, but as a grand equalizer of economic outcomes.