Americans don't hate government, unless I've missed something. They desire that government should keep its voice down, wipe its shoes and control its diet. This is for substantial reasons. First, big government costs more than we can afford -- $9 trillion is now the projected size of the Obama deficit, assuming voters stand by and let Congress enact the full, current Obama agenda. Second, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Big government begins by promising the good life and ends by defining that life. Is there anyone who hasn't heard Lord Acton on the subject? Power tends to corrupt, and … you know the rest.
The debate over Ted Kennedy's legacy, with Kennedy's fine stentorian voice silenced, may be brief. Kennedy made the exercise of government power sound to many like a function of civic duty. "Liberty" wasn't the senator's favorite word. You never heard him suggest there was danger in government oversight of our lives. You never heard John F. Kennedy, a moderate Democrat, suggest it either, and certainly not the old buccaneer Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the tribe. The "liberal lion," who was Ted Kennedy, roared proudly enough, but the generality of Americans don't like lying down with lions, lest one morning they fail to wake up.
Government in the United States is bigger today than a century ago, bigger than during Reagan's presidency, and likely to become larger. Its growth in America comes in fits and starts, as well as in proportion to the growth of the population and the economy. The love of government, though, for its own sake -- faith in government's purposes and methods -- no lion can sell that stuff. When Americans think of government, they imagine a different beast entirely: large and lumbering, slow-witted and occasionally vengeful. The elephant -- naturally.