Just days after Barack Obama’s election victory last November, Elaine Kamarck and I published an essay with a somewhat downbeat title--“Change You Can Believe In Needs a Government You Can Trust.” We began this way:
“As Barack Obama takes office in 2009, he will confront a paradox. On the one hand, the American people are demanding action in many areas—to improve the economy, to increase access to health care while restraining costs, and to reduce energy costs and our dependence on oil, among others. On the other hand, people are deeply mistrustful of the federal government as an honest and capable agent for achieving these goals. There is nothing new about this ambivalence, but how the next president deals with it may make the difference between success and failure, measured in sustainable public support as well as legislative accomplishment.”
We went on to trace the history and causes of declining trust in government and to recommend a series of steps—including a government reform agenda and modest, confidence-building domestic policy measures—that the new administration could take to nurture public trust in the federal government as an effective and honorable instrument of national purpose. And we warned that “the new administration cannot afford to assume that because the people grudgingly support a massive rescue plan for the financial sector, they will embrace a major expansion of government in other sectors of our society.”
Nothing that has happened in the ensuing ten months has changed my mind about the importance of trust in government. In October 2008, at the end of the Bush administration, just 17 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing all or most of the time. Barack Obama’s inauguration has made remarkably little difference: The latest CBS survey reports that the trust level now stands at 23 percent. By contrast, it stood at 47 percent in 2004, 44 percent in 2000, and 40 percent in 1988. (From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, it averaged more than 60 percent.)
