Short Honeymoon?

Doyle McManus (who has a very cool name) wrote this thoughtful piece on Pres. Obama as old-fashioned politician, not the Hope We've Been Waiting For, or whatever. My favorite paragraph is the second to last:

But the partisan divide runs deeper than mere political gamesmanship. The debate about how big the federal government should be has been at the core of American politics since the Articles of Confederation. In his inaugural address, Obama dismissed it as one of "the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long," but it's too fundamental a question to wave away, even in the face of a crisis as big as this one.

Then he concludes:

Obama talks as if he'd like to avoid choosing sides, but he can't. At this point, the enactment of the stimulus package, the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, looks more like old-fashioned politics―a popular president steamrolling a fragmented opposition―than any New Age post-partisan convergence.

I can't see why an argument is "stale" merely because it's old. Does an enlargement of the government's role in our lives have a negative effect on its citizens? There are those in our country who passionately answer "yes" and others who passionately disagree with them. So the evidence shows the argument is pertinent, not "stale" or merely a construct of party politics. From hourly workers in Cleveland complaining in a bar about how they are required to stand out in sub-zero weather to have a smoke to corporate boards contemplating moving their operations off-shore, those on the "smaller government" side represent practically every education and income level.

Obama's staleness claim is classic liberal-left intimidation-by-ridicule, albeit in the soft-pedaled rhetorical tones which Obama utilizes so skillfully. It presumes that he takes no side in this argument, but that he is somehow magically above and beyond the partisan discursists. This has been the problem with our new President all along. To conservatives, this mantra reveals that liberals have no good arguments for their belief in big government―its acceptance is purely dogmatic. At best, they are waiting for us to "see the light", but more typically, they are accusing us of starving poor children, suppressing minorities and suchlike in order to get us to cave-in.