The conservative obsession with the size of government

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder remarked about President Obama's speech last night before a joint session of Congress that it read "as a President justifying his plans to expand government." In other words, a speech about the nation's economic crisis was not really about that, it was about some kind of liberal agenda to expand government. Only an ideologically blinkered conservative would have that interpretation, because only conservatives are existentially obsessed with the size of government. They have that obsession because they have an absolutist definition of individual freedom as always engaged in a zero-sum game with government, whether or not that government is based on the consent of the people. Equally hostile to the freely elected government in Washington or authoritarian-minded rulers in Iran or Russia, American conservatives are essentially anti-democratic. So they reject any innovative usage of government even in their very own democracy. And that's why they don't comprehend Obama. He's beyond a zero-sum view of freedom-or-government, because he realizes that if the people he democratically represents want him to exercise vigorous public leadership to solve public problems, he had better do that, or else he'll simply be using his paycheck to do his own bloviating -- which is the modern Republican equivalent of governing. Leading America in 2009 is not about parsing the size of government. It's about saving the economic system that created the recent boom in the first place -- something that Republicans, amazingly, don't seem to have any ideas about -- re-establishing a system of justice based on the rule of law rather than the whim of a president, and restoring a proper humility to the use of American power elsewhere in the world, so that national security is not reliant solely on military force. Republicans have no ideas about how to do those things, either. They are flat on their political backs. And we know who is putting fresh vitality back into national leadership. It ain't Bobby Jindal.