Despite some estimates the September 12th march on Washington approached a record 2 million American citizens, Rasmussen is reporting today that President Obama’s approval index has experienced a stunning turnaround over the past week.

From an approval rating low of a minus 13 on September 7th, Obama has seen his positive numbers jump over 10 points since his health care speech to Congress last Wednesday.  In other words, up to 2 million colorful and passionate defenders of limited government flooding in to the nation’s capitol had no effect on a steady and continuing rise of Obama’s political fortunes at this critical moment in American history.  Although a Wapo-ABC News poll has uncovered less of a bounce for Obama, we still should take the Rasmussen numbers seriously.

Over the weekend Mark Steyn penned in my opinion his most prophetic, serious, and depressing column of late.  Steyn lays out what’s in store for an America that, despite the White House’s amateurish obfuscation and bumbling with respect to health care, will probably succumb to the inevitable:

“As I’ve written before, the appeal of this issue to [Obama] and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, et al., is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture — one in which elections are always fought on the Left’s issues and on the Left’s terms, and in which ‘conservative’ parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can. Listen to your average British Tory or French Gaullist on the campaign trail pledging to ‘deliver’ government services more ‘efficiently.’”

“My sense from Wednesday’s speech is that the president’s gonna shove this through in some form or other. It may cause a little temporary pain in Blue Dog districts in 2010, but the long-term gains will be transformative and irreversible.”