Obama and Congress invent new dance: 'The Slide'

David Brooks is the sole conservative on the Noo Yawk Times editorial staff. Which means his conservative credentials are roughly as suspect as the virtue of a piano player in a whore house.

But when Brooks points out what he calls "The Obama Slide," and he ain't talking about a new dance, it's sorta like a Jeff Foxworthy sign that you might be a redneck. When Brooks says Obama might be in trouble, you can bet your sweet bippy BHO is wading into deep doo-doo.

By force of circumstances and by design, the president has promoted one policy after another that increases spending and centralizes power in Washington.

The result is the Obama slide, the most important feature of the current moment. The number of Americans who trust President Obama to make the right decisions has fallen by roughly 17 percentage points. Obama’s job approval is down to about 50 percent. All presidents fall from their honeymoon highs, but in the history of polling, no newly elected American president has fallen this far this fast.

Anxiety is now pervasive. Trust in government rose when Obama took office. It has fallen back to historic lows. Fifty-nine percent of Americans now think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

That's the bad news for the Obama White House. Then Brooks notes that the political outlook for the leftwingnut Democrat leadership in Congress is even worse.

The public’s view of Congress, which ticked upward for a time, has plummeted. Charlie Cook, who knows as much about Congressional elections as anyone in the country, wrote recently that Democratic fortunes have “slipped completely out of control.” He and the experts he surveyed believe there is just as much chance that the Democrats could lose more than 20 House seats in the next elections as less than 20.

There are also warning signs in the Senate. A recent poll shows Harry Reid, the majority leader, trailing the Republican Danny Tarkanian, a possible 2010 opponent, by 49 percent to 38 percent. When your majority leader is down to a 38 percent base in his home state, that’s not good.

The public has soured on Obama’s policy proposals. Voters often have only a fuzzy sense of what each individual proposal actually does, but more and more have a growing conviction that if the president is proposing it, it must involve big spending, big government and a fundamental departure from the traditional American approach.

Sorta reminds me of the old adage of giving a fool enough rope to hang himself. The leftwingnut Democrats (AKA "Progressive Moderates") have taken power and in their moment in the spotlight have demonstrated they are roughly as progressive and moderate as Attila the Hun.

I for one can't wait for 2010 for voters' revenge on Congress and in 2012 for a new President.