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Michael Baron is attending the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual event that “is a conversation-packed exploration of some of the most important ideas and pressing issues we face”. I’m sure the event if full of serious people making serious faces at serious topics. And probably a bore-fest. But Baron is surprised by what he is hearing:

I note that enthusiasm for Barack Obama and his administration seems to be conspicuously missing. Lloyd Grove has a pungent account in The Daily Beast titled “The Elite turn against Obama,” based on speeches by Niall Ferguson and my former boss at U.S. News Mort Zuckerman on economic policy.

Grove’s article in The Daily Beast is searing. Some quotes:

“The real problem we have,” Mort Zuckerman said, “are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”

[...]

“We are, without question, in a period of decline, particularly in the business world,” Zuckerman said. “The real problem we have…are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”

“If you’re asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I’d say it’s actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we’ve already experienced in Western Europe,” Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson declared during Monday’s kickoff session, offering a withering critique of Obama’s economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness.

“Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy.”

Its one thing for pundits and economists to proffer critical opinions from the lectern, but quite another when even the elite entertainment crowd chimes in:

This was greeted by hearty applause from a crowd that included Barbra Streisand and her husband James Brolin. “Depressing, but fantastic,” Streisand told me afterward, rendering her verdict on the session. “So exciting. Wonderful!”

Brolin’s assessment: “Mind-blowing.”

As if that weren’t enough, Grove quotes new media tycoon Arianna Huffington:

He said jobs were going to be his No. 1 priority—there’s a huge disconnect between Washington and what’s going on out in the country. The president’s economic team kept talking about a ‘cyclical’ problem. Larry Summers said jobs were a lagging economic indicator. All these things are simply wrong. The president put all his trust in the wrong economic team—an economic team that didn’t understand what was happening.

Baron notes that there were “even occasional notes of nostalgia for George W. Bush” among the rich folks gathered there.

Before conservatives smile and enjoy their moment of schadenfreud, Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club has some sobering thoughts:

The interesting question is what happens if enough people lose faith in the administration and find that even after they’ve affixed the blame the downward momentum still continues. Will the country have a ‘Thresher moment’ and lack the time and energy to set things right? In 1963 the USS Thresher which was the newest, fastest SSN [submarine] in the US Navy was on a test dive off Cape Cod. It probably sprang a leak at test depth. There at the edge of its envelope, the leak triggered the worst possible response: an automatic reactor shutdown. Without the power to drive itself to the surface the Thresher continued to sink. They blew ballast. But something unexpected happened: in those conditions the high pressure air cooled and froze the pipes. She had plugged herself and sank ever deeper until the depths claimed her.

That terrible loss of reserve energy just when the system needed it most is the biggest threat that the Obama bleed-off of resources poses. The presumption is that once enough political erosion has occurred then someone will blow the ballast and the sub will surface. What must be factored in is time. Nations don’t turn on a dime. The gigantic programs initiated by the administration will bear a momentum not easily reversed.

Government spending is no substitute for real jobs, created by private industry, that employs real people. The Obama administration tried to apply 1940′s Keynesian solutions to a 21st century problem, and succeeded only in introducing uncertainty. So much uncertainty that business will not take the risk of adding jobs to their payroll.