People don't like more government...

But if you cry out for reforms in the private industry (banking, healthcare, war) then what else is there? As Noam Scheiber notes in response to David Brook's recent NYT column:

All of these things do increase the role of government in the economy. But once you concede that the problems need to be addressed, there isn't much of an alternative. And Obama's approaches are pretty scrupulous about not increasing that role more than necessary, which seems to be the whole conceit. Sure, you could do these things in marginally less centralized ways. But, as Brooks concedes, that probably won't matter PR-wise, since, "Voters often have only a fuzzy sense of what each individual proposal actually does." So the idea that there's some less-centralized way of achieving Obama's goals that would be much more popular politically — which Brooks suggests — seems pretty unlikely to me.