Eleanor Clift and I agree on virtually nothing, but she nearly gets this right:

The many millions of liberals who gambled that a young, charismatic politician could become a great president are now feeling that they’re in political nirvana. First, President Obama rolled out a bold agenda on energy, education and health care before Congress on Tuesday evening. Then he produced a budget backing up those commitments. . . . It’s becoming more clear by the day that Obama is a president of stunning ambition. Some members of Congress reacted skeptically when Obama said he would halve the deficit by the end of his first term. Yet compared with the other challenges he set out, like saving capitalism and finding a cure for cancer, cutting the deficit is small potatoes. Opponents say he’s unrealistic or even dangerous.

My quibble, of course, is that he is not out to “save” capitalism, but to disable it and replace it with a statist arrangement wherein the government owns banks and car companies, directs employers on how to pay and treat their employees, limits industrial output, and runs the healthcare system.

But all this raises an interesting political question: who’s in favor of this other than “millions of liberals”? (And some of them might be having second thoughts.) Contrary to what Nancy Pelosi would have us believe, liberals don’t make up a majority of the country. Exit polling in 2008 showed they made up about 22% of the electorate. That’s why Obama didn’t run on a platform of remaking our entire economic system or spending more in a month than George Bush did in seven years on two wars and Katrina. Instead, he ran on “going line by line” through the budget, a net decrease in spending, tax cuts and lots of mushy, soothing rhetoric.

So now that he’s in office,  and has the Pelosi-Reid machine at his disposal, does he muscle this through and wait to see if the country reacts in horror? Somewhere in all the talk about “liberal nirvana” is the unspoken recognition that this is agony for non-liberals. Whether that changes the course of Obama’s agenda or brings it to a quick halt in the next Congressional election remains to be seen.