Voters continue to think pretty highly of Barack Obama. But these numbers suggest that they are responding more negatively to Democratic proposals that have a chance at passage than they did to Democratic platform planks that were, until the 2008 election, only political rhetoric. The $787 billion stimulus package, the cap-and-trade bill's utility-rate increases, the public health insurance package -- all these seem to generate more apprehension than enthusiasm.

So does the prospect of doubling the national debt, as the Congressional Budget Office estimates, from about 40 percent of gross domestic product to about 80 percent. That's about where it ended up after World War II. Americans evidently regard our current economic situation, though negative, as not enough to justify the magnitude of deficit spending that was appropriate in an all-out world war.

I have been pleasantly (and others have been unpleasantly) surprised by our fellow citizens' unwillingness to embrace bigger government in a time of economic distress. American history -- the New Deal -- has disposed us to consider such a shift natural. But it was not universal even in the 1930s. In that decade, voters in Britain, Canada and Australia preferred parties opposed to bigger government, even as voters in the United States, France and New Zealand went the other way. And polling suggested that Americans by the late 1930s had become wary of the New Deal.

I think the shift in reliance from markets to government in the 1930s or the other way around in the 1970s was not fully completed until the next decades, when Americans saw the success of big government policies during World War II and the unexpected economic boom that resulted from low taxes in the 1980s. Those successes were also successes of American policy in the world -- the defeat of Nazism in 1945 and the fall of communism in 1989.

It's still possible for American attitudes to shift, if the Democrats' economic policies are passed and are seen to revive the economy. But it hasn't happened yet. Instead, Americans seem to be recoiling against big government when it threatens to become a reality rather than a campaign promise.