It's nothing new for president and people to drift apart. Any more than there's anything remarkable about the ebb and flow of fickle American public opinion in general. It can swing from left to right and back again with the regularity of a metronome. What impresses about this latest shift, which is easier to feel than to measure in the polls, is the speed with which it is occurring. This president hasn't been in office a year yet he seems to grow ever more distant.

Why is that? Maybe it's because he began at such a high point in public esteem, and with such a reservoir of good will even among many who might not have voted for him. So the least decline in his popularity appears great. Maybe it's because of the unrealistic, even messianic, hopes he raised during his campaign, and then during his triumphal pre-inaugural tours and the glittering beginnings of his presidency. He had nowhere to go but down after that. The contrast between those heady days and the grime that must come with having to deal with the real world is all the more striking in this president's case.

It all has a familiar feeling, unfortunately. Anyone with a memory for these things will recall Jimmy Carter's progression from bright hope to utter disappointment in those ghastly '70s. In keeping with the pace of technological innovation since the Carter Years, the whole sad process has been speeded up considerably these days.

How explain the quicksilver change in the public mood? Is it because this president has tried to do so much, or because he has tried to do it so vaguely? Whatever the reason, there is no palpable sense of satisfaction about whatever it is he's doing these days, which remains uncertain.

There is still a vast well of sympathy out there for the new president, but a president needs more than sympathy. Mr. Carter had sympathy, at least before he became as unsatisfactory an ex-president as he had been a president. Herbert Hoover had sympathy, at least after a few decades and a generation had passed, and the passage of time had softened memories of the Great Depression he presided over. (Time may not heal, but it does tend to cover the scars.)

Why the feeling now that we stand at the beginning of another president's estrangement from the nation that had just rallied around him? The shibboleths of his presidential campaign -- Hope! Change! Audacity! -- seem almost forgotten now except for purposes of irony.

It's not just the downtick in the polls that sets off this feeling; polls should mean little to a president of principle. There's something more involved here than the usual vagaries of fortune charted by the pollsters and pulse-takers of the chattering classes.

This administration's big problem is that a sense of proportion is returning to American politics after a financial panic that many, including the president, seemed to confuse with the coming of another Great Depression, or at least with a chance to enact changes as sweeping as another New Deal. Maybe on his chief of staff's theory that no crisis should ever be wasted.

Think of the opportunity a great crisis presents for social engineering, but this crisis may already be waning, and the people are waking up. They may no longer be as willing to write their new president a blank check. As panic fades, so does the desperation that leads people to hand over power to a new leader with new plans. Big plans.

The big thinkers in the White House may have thought they were back in the utter depths of 1932. But the crisis they had to deal with was more like the Panic of 1907, when the country had a J. P. Morgan instead of a Federal Reserve to deal with such things. Back then one man, if he were the right man, could step in and re-finance and re-organize the banks and investment houses. And do a much better job of it than today's Fed and Treasury Department combined. Only afterward, when the crisis had been weathered, would J. Pierpont Morgan be rewarded with the fear, suspicion, envy and hatred of his countrymen. Continued...