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Maybe one reason former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and so much of the digital Left can so casually dismiss the Senate health care reform bill is that they operate in an environment where so few people need to worry about access to insurance.

The 2004 presidential campaign that propelled Dean to national prominence was fueled predominantly by "wine track" Democratic activists-generally college-educated white liberals. (In the virtually all-white 2004 Iowa caucus, for instance, exit polls showed that two-thirds of Dean's votes came from voters with a college degree.) Those are the same folks, all evidence suggests, who provide the core support for online activist groups like MoveOn.org or Dean's Democracy for America and congregate most enthusiastically on liberal websites. (According to studies by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, college graduates are more than twice as likely as those with only a high-school degree to communicate about politics online.) Along with Dean, those digital Democratic activists are generating the loudest demands to derail the Senate bill.

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A fascinating survey released Thursday by the Pew Economic Mobility Project-one of the few million research arms of the Pew Charitable Trusts-illuminates from some fresh angles the complex American attitudes toward opportunity, fairness and government likely to shape public reaction to President Obama's sweeping agenda.

The survey, jointly conducted by the Democratic polling firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm of Public Opinion Strategies, studied public attitudes about whether it's possible to get ahead in America and what it takes to do so. The poll (which surveyed 2,119 adults from January 27 through February 8) didn't directly address the immediate political debate; but it charted, with unusual scope, the backdrop of underlying attitudes against which the argument between the parties is playing out. And it offered warning flares for both sides.
Overall, the survey found that most Americans-across class lines-still believe that the most important factor in whether people get ahead is their own talent and effort, not broad social and economic conditions. By a decisive 71% to 21%, those polled said upward mobility depended more on the "individual person and things like hard work and drive" than "outside factors and things like the economy and their economic circumstances growing up." At least three-fifths of those surveyed at every income level picked individual effort as the key to success.

"People still think that individuals matter a great deal in this country, more so than government in determining their fate and what happens to them," says Glen Bolger, the POS pollster who worked on the survey and accompanying focus groups.

In a separate question, hard work, having ambition, and staying healthy -- all personal traits largely under individual control-ranked one-two-three when respondents were asked what factors determined whether people advanced in life. Similarly when asked why people slip down the income ladder, the top picks were "poor life choices" and "too much debt"-personal decisions again.

As the pollsters wrote in a memo summarizing the results, "Despite the economic downturn...the notion that America is a meritocracy where individuals can apply themselves and move ahead continues to endure. Most Americans, including those on the bottom rung of the income ladder, believe their own economic mobility is within their control and remain optimistic about their ability...to get ahead."

That inclination to look toward individual initiative as the key factor in success tilted most of those polled toward Republican perspectives on two key questions. While many Democrats from Obama on down argue that the rewards of economic growth have been unfairly tilted toward the affluent for roughly the past quarter-century, ensuring "fairness" was less of a priority for most of those surveyed than expanding opportunity. Asked whether it was "more important...to reduce inequality in America or to ensure everyone has a fair chance of improving their economic standing" just 21% picked reducing inequality, while a resounding 71% put greater priority on ensuring opportunity. Those results were virtually unchanged at every rung along the income ladder, and suggest the limits of a Democratic message that sells redistributive tax policy primarily on the grounds of economic fairness.

David Walker, a senior associate at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, says the results point to an important dividing line in public attitudes about the affluent. While voters "don't resent the rich," he says, they do grow resentful "when they believe the rich are getting advantages at their expense." So while a broad message of economic equity might not resonate, he argues, there is more public support for government policies targeted at specific actions viewed as unfair-such as excessive executive compensation in companies receiving public aid. In many ways, that's an updated version of the arguments Andrew Jackson rode to the White House
in 1828.

The survey identifies another potential obstacle for Obama: in one of the poll's most striking findings, a 46% to 36% plurality believe the government now does more to hurt than to help people get ahead. While a 48% to 33% plurality of Democrats thought government did more to help than hurt, Republicans (26-62) and independents (26-55) overwhelmingly disagreed. At every income level, more respondents thought government hurt than helped their ability to get ahead.

Those findings suggest an entrenched skepticism confronts Obama's effort to portray government as a critical tool in expanding opportunity for average families.

And yet the door doesn't seem completely closed on that sale either. Like many surveys, this poll found more support for specific government actions than for government intervention as a broad principle. Despite the overall skepticism about government's contribution to economic advancement, a quality education ranked just behind hard work, ambition and health when people were asked what factors contributed most to personal economic success. Even more telling, the poll found substantial majorities believed an assortment of discrete government policies could widen opportunity. Fully 81% of those polled, for instance, said policies to keep American jobs at home could be "very effective" in improving economic mobility; 75% said making college more affordable would also be very effective. Majorities of at least 60% said the same thing about reducing health care costs, expanding pre-school, widening job training, helping small business, and facilitating retirement saving-all Obama priorities. Cutting taxes, the main Republican alternative, ranked a clear step behind with just over 50% calling it very effective.

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From his inauguration address forward, President Obama hasn't pulled any punches in criticizing the record of his predecessor, George W. Bush. In that process--which reached a new peak with the release of the administration's budget plan last Thursday--Obama is aggressively employing a strategy used by the presidents who have most powerfully realigned the political landscape through American history. It is an approach that Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek has shrewdly termed "the authority to repudiate."

In a classic 1997 book called The Politics Presidents Make and a 2008 follow-up called Presidential Leadership in Political Time, Skowronek noted that the presidents who most successfully constructed lasting electoral majorities all followed presidents widely viewed as failures. These repeated couplings between "manifest incapacity and towering success" have included John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800; John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in 1828; James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln in 1860; Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932; and, most recently, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Skowronek argues that these dynamic presidents--who he dubs "reconstructive leaders"--have succeeded not only because of their own skills. Their impact is so great because they arrived at a moment when the dominant party over the previous generation has been discredited by failure or corruption, or both, and large voting blocs are open to something new. Skowronek has described the process this way: "The presidents who traditionally appear on lists of America's most effective political leaders-Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and FDR-were, like Reagan, opposition leaders standing steadfast against already discredited political regimes. These were men of very different background, character, and political skill....What they shared was a moment in a political sequence in which presidential authority is at its most compelling, a moment when opponents stand indicted in the court of public opinion...."

Key to the success of the reconstructive or realigning presidents has been the ability to justify their direction and expand their support by indicting the failures of the old order. "The great communicators in presidential history all tend to be great repudiators," Skowronek said in an interview. "The presidents who are the most successful in redefining the terms and conditions of legitimate national government, the ones who are most successful in setting a new course...are ones who have had this authority to repudiate."

Obama and his advisers intuitively seem to recognize that. Literally from the first moments of his presidency, Obama has repudiated Bush in unusually pointed terms. The process started in Obama's inaugural address, when he declared, in an unmistakable reference to Bush's security policies, "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." Obama was equally unsparing about Bush's economic policies in his address to Congress last week: "A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market."

The White House took its indictment to a new level in the budget blueprint it released last Thursday. In a relentless 11 pages, the first chapter offers a withering point-by-point critique of Bush's economic record and governing performance, from anemic job creation and income growth (the median income among working-age families fell by nearly $2,000 from 2000 through 2007) to rising poverty (up by 5.7 million from 2000 through 2007). It denounces Bush as overly secretive ("It is no coincidence that the policy failures of the past eight years have been accompanied by unprecedented Governmental secrecy"), incompetent, fiscally irresponsible, short-sighted, ideologically rigid (pursuing "a dogmatic deregulatory approach") and favoring the rich over all others. The White House sums up the previous occupant's record this way: "This is the legacy that we inherit--a legacy of mismanagement and misplaced priorities, of missed opportunities and of deep, structural problems ignored for too long."

Other than that, what did you really think?

David Axelrod, Obama's senior White House political adviser, said in an interview that the detailed critique and tough language was necessary to establish a "baseline" from which the public can assess Obama's progress. "We inherited [federal] deficits over one trillion; the worst economy since World War II," Axelrod said. "This is the canvass on which we have to paint, and I think it's important to set that baseline."

In the most immediate sense, reminding voters of the hole Bush left behind may buy Obama more time to help the country climb out. And, by linking today's economic storms to his predecessor's policies--"This crisis is neither the result of a normal turn of the business cycle nor an accident of history," Obama wrote in his budget message--he makes it tougher for congressional Republicans to offer alternatives that largely track Bush's approach in their emphasis on tax cuts. Indeed, Obama, while campaigning for the stimulus plan, pointedly argued that while he was open to good ideas from any source, Republicans should not "come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis."

But the payoff for Obama in a strategy of repudiation could be much larger than these tactical advantages. Skowronek notes that it is precisely at the moments when the old approaches have been most thoroughly discredited that presidents have most lastingly reshaped both the electoral alignment and the governing agenda. And they have done so, he maintains, largely because the broad public rejection of the previously dominant political ideas creates an unusually large opening to redirect government's priorities and approaches. That's what Roosevelt did in 1932 when he laid the foundation of the modern welfare state on the ruins of Hoover's largely laissez-faire ideology and what Reagan did in 1980, when his insistence that "government is the problem" interred Roosevelt's New Deal coalition and redrew the boundaries of political debate for the next 28 years.

Could this be another such hinge in political history--one that tilts the scales toward a lasting Democratic advantage and an era of more activist government than was possible in the first decades after Reagan? One of the predicates is undeniably present. The country rejected Bush in his second term as profoundly as a president can be rejected: on Election Day last year, an incredible 71% of voters in the exit poll disapproved of his performance.

The real question is whether that verdict was simply a personal rejection of Bush, or a more fundamental recoil from the underlying anti-tax, anti-regulation philosophy that has held the upper hand in Washington since Reagan. It's too early to say for sure, of course, but the scale of Obama's proposals on every front suggests he believes it is the latter. Axelrod says as much. "I think there's no question that a verdict has been rendered on the policies of the past eight years and in many ways extending back to the governing philosophy that we've had for 30 years," he said.

The White House's operating theory is that negative "verdict" provides Obama much more latitude than Bill Clinton to advance programs that expand government's role. "There's a cyclical nature to American politics and there are epochs," Axelrod said. "And in 1980, the New Deal-Great Society epoch came to end and it launched another [conservative] era that I think history will say lasted 28 years." While the Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon presidencies were "wedged into" the New Deal epoch, and Clinton's into the conservative era, Axelrod continued, each were constrained by "the governing theory" set by Roosevelt and Reagan respectively.

So is 2009 the beginning of another epoch that will enshrine a new governing theory for the next generation? Axelrod is aware how many other presidential political gurus have been mesmerized by that light in the distance. And yet Axelrod can't help but think that prospect may be flickering more brightly than usual now. "I know others who have sat in the office I'm sitting in have talked about realignment," he said. "I think its premature to talk about that. But I think this is not an ordinary time. I think this is potentially one of those transitional moments."

Presidents who believe they are governing in "transitional moments" take greater risks to impose bigger changes. When the country embraces those changes (as in the case of Skowronek's reconstructive presidents) the policy and political payoff is enormous. But Bush and his political guru Karl Rove also believed they could reshape the electorate with bold change to establish a lasting majority for their party. Instead they governed in a polarizing manner that lost the country's confidence and eventually decimated the Republican electoral coalition. That's a cold testament to the risks facing ambitious presidents who reach beyond their electoral mandate--and a reminder to Obama that in repudiating Bush, he needs to be careful not to emulate him.