Survey after survey in recent months has shown an alarming decline in public confidence in the nation’s chief federal institutions, as well as a deepening pessimism about America’s future. Congressional approval is at an all-time low of 13 percent, according to the Gallup Poll, and three-quarters of the public wouldn’t re-elect most members of Congress. There is cold comfort in the numbers for President Obama. Barely 41 percent of the public approves of his job performance, according to Gallup. Most worrisome is the fact that a majority of Americans, 52 percent, told pollster Scott Rasmussen this week that they believe the country’s best days are behind it, the first time a majority has so responded. Anybody puzzled by these trends, however, need look no further than the performance of some of our leaders in recent days. Obama gave a bitterly partisan address in Kansas, which featured, as The Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone pointed out, a crude, straw-man caricature meant to portray Republicans falsely as believing “we are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.” The chief executive also claimed — without evidence, his aides later conceded — that “some billionaires have a tax rate as low as one percent.” Such deceptions and inventions destroy a president’s credibility.

Next, there is Attorney General Eric Holder, the man Obama appointed as the nation’s chief law enforcement official. For months Holder has claimed, in the face of steadily mounting evidence to the contrary, that he knew nothing about Operation Fast and Furious until he read about it in the newspapers earlier this year. Fast and Furious is the Justice Department program in which officials allowed thousands of weapons to be sold by U.S. dealers to Mexican drug cartels. Just before Christmas, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered with one of those weapons. Hundreds of Mexican citizens, including multiple government officials, have also been killed with Fast and Furious guns.