The bloom is escaping the Obama rose, it seems. A new NYT/CBS poll suggests pretty strongly that while a vibrant majority still approves of Obama's trying to change things, they don't think that what he's done so far succeeds in changing much of anything.

A distinct gulf exists between Mr. Obama’s overall standing and how some of his key initiatives are viewed, with fewer than half of Americans saying they approve of how he has handled health care and the effort to save General Motors and Chrysler. A majority of people said his policies have had either no effect yet on improving the economy or had made it worse, underscoring how his political strength still rests on faith in his leadership rather than concrete results.

That last little jibe is the standard NYT attempt to ignore the Bush mess while hinting that Obama isn't a real president but some feel-good mistake on our part. Ignore it. important is that what people have told the polls is accurate: we do approve and even demand change but we're not getting it and we know it.

On Wednesday, President Obama unveiled what he described as “a sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system, a transformation on a scale not seen since the reforms that followed the Great Depression.”

In terms of the sheer number of proposals, outlined in an 88-page document the administration released on Tuesday, that is undoubtedly true. But in terms of the scope and breadth of the Obama plan — and more important, in terms of its overall effect on Wall Street’s modus operandi — it’s not even close to what Roosevelt accomplished during the Great Depression.

Rather, the Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself. Without question, the latter would be more difficult, more contentious and probably more expensive. But it would also have more lasting value.

And we're not even trying. The reasons are simple and Digby does a nice job today of laying them out: the Third Way BS and Reagan.

Low taxes, eliminating welfare ("as we know it") demagogueing entitlements and expanding military spending has pretty much been Reagan's program which both parties continue to run on and govern with. You'll recall that Bill Clinton declared "the era of big government is over." And Obama famously evoked Reagan during the campaign and more recently talked about striking a "Grand Bargain" on cutting "entitlements." (Or Peter Orzsag saying that social security reform is "a test of manhood.")

Of course, this comes back to the basic problem of the Democratic party which lost its moorings some time back and even with a huge majority can't seem to figure out how to govern outside the center right paradigm. (That assumes they would even want to do that, which is, at this point, highly questionable.)

On health care, arguably the most important Democratic initiative of our lifetimes, they are bargaining away any hope of real success because basically it cannot fit into the Reagan governance program. They took single payer off the table years ago and the presidential candidates kicked it completely out the door. Today, as dday lays out in all its ugly detail below, they are bargaining away the public option, the only hope of keping the insurance companies from irrevocably corrupting the reform efforts. Evidently, they refuse to fight the insurance companies which, after the banks (who have also asserted their ownership of the US government) are their most valued benefactors.

I and others have been predicting ever since we saw the Wall Street JoyBoys Obama has surrounded himself with, from Rahm to Timmy to Larry, et al, that there weren't going to be any substantive changes no matter what Obama's rhetoric seemed to be promising - or did promise. And we were right. We have the Democrat party as deeply mired in Reaganism as the GOP and a long-time establishment president who dumped his liberal roots to nurse his ambitions. We're getting sold down the river, and to the same guys who created the flood that destroyed our homes and businesses.

The only question left is whether Obama is canny enough to read the writing on the wall and dump his slavish dependency on TW conservatism in favor of what we the people want, or if he is going to pull a Bush and stubborn us into long-term bankruptcy, finishing the job Bush began of making us the first First World nation to voluntarily turn itself into a Third World dungheap. He's smart enough but is he flexible?

More important, is he brave enough to pull an FDR and tell the corpo's to go to hell?