Election Day 2009 was a very good time to be a moderately conservative Republican promising to restrain government spending and to get needed things done without making bigger government the solution of first choice. It was not a good day to be a Democrat linked with Washington’s biggest problem — politicians who promise one thing, but then do something else entirely.

After less than a year in office, President Obama is well on his way to becoming emblematic of Washington double talk. On the 2008 campaign trail, he promised a “net federal spending cut” and “a tax cut for 95 percent of America’s working families.” But once inaugurated in 2009, Obama joined the Democratic majority in Congress in detonating a thermonuclear explosion of federal borrowing, spending, taxing, subsidizing, regulating, wasting and guaranteeing. He remains personally popular, but public support for his policies, most notably health care reform, is near or below 50 percent and steadily trending downward.