Unfortunately, the sizing down of political expectations isn't realistic: not when government has muscled into every known field of endeavor. We, the people (through our government apparatus) own General Motors? Incredible. We're on the verge of committing control of health care policy to the government? Still more incredible. No constitutional lawyer blinks an eye at such assertions of authority over the private sector? That's not incredible in the least. No one these days ever seems to doubt that Congress will do, and get away with doing, whatever it likes -- permitted or not by the Constitution.
Up and down Washington the crowds may surge and surge again. It's hard to see how things will basically change, inasmuch as the old-fashioned conviction that government has proper limits looks as durable as the seas and the mountains.
People who want Washington to change its ways are often on the right track -- especially, now with the Democrats leering at unprecedented opportunities for controlling our lives through health care. It's the whole "wanting" thing, for better or worse, that gets in the way of reform. We want, we want, we want -- and, boy, do our leaders, and all aspiring to that dignity, want us to have it. Grateful voters make for long tenures and big government pensions, not to mention overseas travel, large staffs, chauffeured vehicles, and, oh, yes, constant access to microphones and cameras capable of making some essentially little people look very big indeed.
Here's a problem harder to solve than health care: how to loosen voters' grips on the idea that politics can be twisted productively to serve specified ends -- my ends, of course, not yours, which aren't half as good as mine. The Psalmist, all these centuries later, draws top honors for political advice: "O put not your trust in princes … for there is no help in them."