Sunday's Washington Post (10/10/10) featured a story by Jon Cohen and Dan Balz that led with this claim:

If there is an overarching theme of election 2010, it is the question of how big the government should be and how far it should reach into people's lives.

The piece is actually an explanation of the results of a new poll conducted by the Post along with the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. As Dean Baker noted (10/10/10), "There is absolutely nothing in this article that supports this assertion." He is correct. The Post's report deals with the supposedly conflicted nature of public opinion, where people complain about the performance of the federal government but then also express strong support for certain government programs. Even this seems a tad oversold; one can very easily think highly of Social Security and believe in additional government spending to spur the economy while also having little confidence "in the government's ability to solve problems."

So why is there this "big government" framing of the issue, then?  Baker points out that certain politicians benefit from it:

There are no candidates anywhere in the country who are running in support of "big government," there are candidates who are running in support of programs which have varying degrees of support. There are many candidates (virtually all Republicans) who are running against "big government." While this position has nothing to do with the world (we all oppose waste, fraud and abuse; the question is always the status of specific programs), it is certainly helpful to the Republicans to have the election framed in this way.

And in his column today (New York Times, 10/11/10) , Paul Krugman helpfully pushes back against this entire theme:

Here's the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can't create jobs.

Here's what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: We never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.

Yesterday's Washington Post (12/16/09) reports that the public isn't sold on healthcare reform. As the headline puts it:

Public Cooling to Healthcare Reform as Debate Drags On, Poll Finds

The story by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen explains that "there is minimal public enthusiasm for the kind of comprehensive changes in healthcare now under consideration." Now, how "comprehensive" the reforms under consideration are is certainly debatable, but these conclusions seem to be drawn from questions about costs and Barack Obama's handling of the issue.

But the Post did ask other, more interesting questions--and then buried the results. Deep into the article we learn that "more than six in 10 favor expanding Medicare to people ages 55 to 64 who lack insurance--a proposal included in one Senate compromise effort that appears unlikely to survive final negotiations." In the next graph, readers are told:

On the issue of whether and how to expand coverage to those who do not have it, 36 percent favor a government plan to compete with private insurers, 30 percent prefer private plans coordinated by the government and 30 percent want the system to remain intact.

As with the so-called Medicare "buy-in," this finding of strong support for a public option suggests that the public is much more supportive of fundamental health care changes than the Congress or White House. In other words, the public isn't really "cooling" to health care reform;  they want more than the politicians are likely to deliver.