It’s starting to feel an awful lot like 1994.
Pamela Anderson is back on the tube (dancing instead of slow-motion jogging), Democrats are in control of Congress and the White House, and that familiar anti-government wind is again rustling through the country.
Trust in our government is bottoming out, according to polls.
Who can blame us? It seems that whenever we turn on the TV (and we’re not watching Anderson on “Dancing with the Stars”), there’s news of some sort of corporate giveaway or federal takeover or useless partisan sniping. Meanwhile, the debt and deficit are approaching make-believe numbers and the jobless rate is still high.
All of that, according to a poll released last week, has acted like a “perfect storm,” creating our profound distrust of government. Only one in five people polled still trusts our federal government, according to the Pew Research Center survey.
“Rather than an activist government to deal with the nation’s top problems, the public now wants government reformed, and growing numbers want its power curtailed,” the survey suggests.
I suppose we can forgive President Obama if he feels a bit whipsawed by such statements. I mean, the guy told us what he was going to do when he was running for president, and a sizeable majority of the country said, “Yes, we can.” Now, suddenly, they’re all saying, “Oh no, you don’t.”
But the national poll doesn’t jibe with what we’ve seen happen locally in recent weeks. While we’re distrustful of Washington and “big government,” Coloradans, it seems, are pretty comfortable with their hometown leaders and their local governments.
In municipal elections held earlier this month, voters in Colorado towns and cities approved seven out of nine sales/use tax questions put before them.
Holy Lipton tea bags!
The towns of Superior and Keenesburg approved property tax increases, while Moffat voters agreed to tax food purchases to help refill government coffers.
In Palmer Lake, voters passed three measures allowing the town to de-Bruce itself through 2017 — meaning that town can keep all the revenue it already collects through taxes.
In Haxtun, voters agreed to go into debt to pay for street improvements.
And some voters in this big-government-wary world even said “yes” to government growth. Montrose residents agreed to tax themselves to pay for a new downtown development authority to help goose economic development in a town with a 10.3 percent unemployment rate. In South Fork, voters turned down a proposal to reduce the size of the town board.
And Castle Rock voters increased the term of city council members from two to four years. (Hey, isn’t this the year we throw the rascals out, not keep them in longer?)
It comes back to Tip O’Neill’s famous quote: All politics is local. The closer government is to the people, the more we trust it.
Of course, the above-mentioned towns are small. In small towns, you often know your elected leaders. They coach your kids in soccer, or they own the local hardware store. You trust them with your money more than you trust those faceless folks in Congress. Sure, we like our representatives in Congress, which is why so few are ever voted out; it’s just yours we don’t like.
In small towns, and even in cities the size of Denver, a small pebble tossed by a citizen into political waters can make waves. But the government in Washington, D.C., is too far removed from the people.
That’s why we don’t trust it.
So every few years we purge Congress of its rascals, if only to make us little guys feel not so powerless. Yet government only continues to get bigger and do more for us, and politics becomes less local, so the lack of trust only deepens.
And suddenly it’s 1994 all over again.
Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com.
