Full Plate

Whether or not one agrees with President Obama and congressional Democrats on the massive restructuring of the financial and automobile sectors, their historic efforts at health care reform or plans for climate change legislation, the barrage of proposals is breathtaking. It also invites one to think about the context of all of this change.

Looking back to this time last year, Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama had effectively secured their party's presidential nominations, and Obama was holding a consistent if not particularly large lead in the national polls and in key states. What we could not know at that point was whether Obama's small but steady margin was durable. Was there any special racial dynamic, a "Bradley effect," that might make polling less reliable? Or would anything else change the trajectory of the race?

After a brief period when McCain pulled ahead after the Republican convention and the vice presidential nomination of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Obama resumed the lead and the race seemed to stabilize. Then the Lehman Brothers investment banking giant went into default and worldwide credit markets seized up. Soon afterward, the stock markets plummeted, and suddenly everyone understood what some had already feared, that the worldwide economy was in significantly worse shape than we had thought.

The economic collapse created such a toxic political climate that, with seven weeks to go before Election Day, the campaign was effectively over. No Republican nominee, no other running mate, no change in campaign strategy or spending could have made any difference.

But, more importantly than simply setting in concrete an election result that was already fairly probable, last September's economic collapse effectively ended a 28-year period in American public policy where "let the markets work" was the preferred course of action. No matter which candidate won the 2008 election, there would have been a directional shift in the idea of regulation and governmental involvement in the private sector.

Beginning with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and continuing in varying degrees under his successors, American policymakers preferred to defer to the markets and the private sector. Obviously, this tendency varied from president to president, Congress to Congress, agency to agency, year to year and issue to issue. But the deference was real, not just in the financial sector but across the board. All the way to occupational safety, food and pharmaceuticals, the regulatory regime developed a bias toward less intense and rigorous intervention.

While it could be argued that this less interventionist approach encouraged growth and might well have been the right approach for much of that time, the pendulum had simply gone too far. The damage to the economy and the system was too great and, beginning in September, the pendulum has begun swinging in the opposite direction.

Though it is not fashionable these days to praise former President George W. Bush, to his credit he turned to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to do whatever it took in a trial-and-error approach that was unprecedented in its complexity. This dramatic effort to stabilize the financial sector had to be extraordinarily painful for Bush, going against his very ideological marrow, but it was necessary to save the economy.

With his election, this youthful new president -- who, without any irony, is the author of a book called The Audacity of Hope -- has since embarked on an incredibly audacious regime of change that is unlike anything since Franklin Roosevelt's presidency.

Now, about 150 days into his term, the public has responded with what might be described as cautious approval. The Gallup Organization's national nightly tracking poll recently put the president's job approval rating at 61 percent, with 32 percent disapproving.

By comparison, this is not as strong as Presidents Kennedy (72 percent), Nixon (63 percent), Carter (63 percent) and George H.W. Bush (70 percent) were at this point, but better than Presidents Reagan (59 percent), Clinton (39 percent) and George W. Bush (55 percent) were in mid-June.

A mid-June NBC News/Wall Street Journal national poll asked whether Obama is taking on too many issues or whether his focus needs to be so broad because the country is facing so many problems. Only 37 percent thought he was taking on too many issues, while 60 percent agreed that he was right to engage on so many fronts.

Obama's approach to policy change reflects the perspective of someone who has not worked in Washington long enough to know what would normally be considered possible or plausible, or how things are normally done. Being able to restructure the financial and automobile sectors or enact profound health care reform or sweeping climate change legislation would normally be seen as impossible, yet Obama is making considerable headway. He just plows into it, albeit with great thought, planning, skill and panache.

Agree or disagree with the substance and direction of what Obama is attempting to do, it's clear that this intersection of a time and a man has created a dynamic in Washington that is breathtaking in its scope, and, yes, its audacity.