Widespread U.S. unhappiness with the government would seem to call for a blockbuster election, such as the one we had exactly a century ago, when both candidates offered sweeping plans for public renewal.
An election fought over such visions makes more sense than our current jobs-growth donnybrook. The president has far more control over the federal government than over the economy. The 1912 election even provides a template for contention, with one candidate urging a Hamiltonian platform of reform through big government, and the other supporting (at least in the campaign) a progressive libertarianism.
Today, just 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time or more. Only 41 percent agree that “the government is really run for the benefit of all the people.”
President Barack Obama was elected in 2008 as a reformer who connected the recession with the absence of “sensible oversight” that can occur “when special interests put their thumb on the scale.” Two years later, the Tea Party rode a similar surge of anti-governmental anger fueled by the financial bailout and health-care reform or, as Sarah Palin put it, “the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest.”
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