Moving beyond the angst of August?

President Barack Obama and his allies in Congress did not have a very good August. Their fervent goal of ramming through health care “reform” legislation before the summer recess didn’t come to pass. Once Congress went home, many of them got an earful from their constituents.

As those events unfolded, the Congressional leadership tried to focus anger away from their legislation and toward insurance companies. They attempted to re-label the total revamping of the health care delivery system that they were pushing into the context of “insurance reform.” That didn’t sell either.

As the members of Congress reassemble this week, the landscape will be considerably different.

All through the August recess, President Obama’s poll numbers have been dropping – not just for his approval rating but for his job performance as well. As bad as the hits have been for the president, they have been even worse for Congress, which now has favorability ratings approaching all-time lows. The generic Congressional ballot in polls has erased the huge lead Democrats once enjoyed over Republicans and, in some polls, the Republicans now lead in that indicator of the voters’ mood.

Some on the Obama team ascribe this negative trend to “scare tactics” on the part of Obama administration adversaries.

At press time, the president was scheduled to address a joint session of Congress on national television this week to calm the fears and correct the “distortions” about his health care reform agenda. For the first time, he is supposed to outline in some degree of detail exactly what he does and does not support in the legislation.

The problem with this game plan is the fact that opposition to some aspects of health care reform wasn’t the only factor in what was driving the public anger that members of Congress encountered back home. It went much deeper than that.

In short order, taxpayers witnessed the rapid passage of an almost $800 billion stimulus package that few in Congress had read. To many, this huge exercise in deficit spending was much more about keeping the public sector (and public employee unions) going than it was about saving private sector jobs. That behemoth of deficit spending was quickly followed by the GM and Chrysler bailouts, which were peanuts compared to the TARP mega-bailout of financial institutions.

Suddenly the nasty “tax” word started to enter the political discussion at the same time that the previous year’s deficit of $480 billion was rapidly moving toward the $1.8 trillion level for the current budget. All across America, voters of all political persuasions started getting anxious about the never-ending levels of government growth and intrusion into the private sector and the massive federal debt that threatens the standard of living of current and future generations.

That is the explosion that members of Congress encountered when they came home for the summer recess. It wasn’t simply about nuances of health care reform, and the speech that President Obama gives this week isn’t likely to put much of that toothpaste back in the tube.

When the gavels bang and the speeches start, the now scarred legislative landscape in Congress is a clear indication of the poor leadership that has been in place since last January. A “cap and trade” bill that was rammed through the House with barely enough votes to pass lies in the corner. The Senate has no desire to take it up quickly because there aren’t nearly enough votes there to pass it. The deficits soar, economic recovery lags, and the 2010 off-year elections don’t look promising for the party in power.

Maybe it is time for a new game plan.