I might as well point out that this is not too surprising:

Recent town-hall uproars weren’t just about health care. They were also eruptions of concern that the government is taking on too much at once.

That suggests trouble for the president and his party, and fears of losses in next year’s midterm election are likely to shape the Democrats’ fall agenda.

At August’s town-hall meetings, voters often started with complaints about health care, only to shift to frustrations about all the other things President Barack Obama and the Democrats have done or tried to do since January. The $787 billion economic-stimulus package, the government-led rescue of General Motors Corp. and climate-change legislation all came in for criticism…

Last year’s election gave Democrats a mandate for big changes that they feel still applies. They won seats by arguing that Republicans had failed to act to keep the housing market and financial system from crumbling.

It’s been pretty clear to me since last October that the Democrat “mandate” was going to be misread. Obama ascended amidst a perfect storm: an unpopular (and perpetually smeared) 2nd term president exiting the White House, an economic crisis reach its head just before the election, and a racial element that was never seen before, all combined to given him enough votes to win.

Obama wasn’t elected to “fundamentally transform America” (although it was clear that he wanted to); he was elected because he wasn’t Bush, and more generally, because wasn’t a 60 year old white guy with a degree from Yale and an (R) behind his name.

Given how obvious that is (at least to me), what amazes me is why there is any surprise at all that there’s opposition to turning America into a leftwing fantasyland. People weren’t voting for that, they were just voting against Bush (and McCain by association).

In a very cynical sense, Rahm Emmanuel was right about never letting a crisis go to waste, but at the same time, it’s kind of silly and amateurish for such “brilliant” politicians to overreach and create their own crisis, no? Maybe that’s because they’re not as “genius” as they’re thought to be?