Matt Bai identifies "the central theme of Mr. Obama’s presidency: America’s faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work."

He begins with the example of the the new get-naked-or-groped TSA policy and goes on:

From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled...

I add my longtime blog tag "Obama stumbles" to this post.

... blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry....

Bai notes that during the Reagan and Clinton years, America turned away from "the era of big government," but then:

[T]he unraveling of the second Bush administration and the 2008 election... persuaded a lot of long-dispirited liberals that their philosophy, and not simply their party, had been restored. 

What a delusion!