It isn't just that the honeymoon is over. The couple seems headed for divorce.

Rocked by the growing backlash against his rushed and radical health care overhaul and his unprecedented spending spree, Barack Obama's popularity is plunging: down to nearly half the country, after starting his term with soaring approval.

"This is a president who needs a vacation," Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart told NBC News.

Maybe. But it's a good bet that anger and opposition to his health-care takeover will only grow over the August congressional recess, as most members of Congress face agitated constituents for the first time since the sweeping changes were proposed.

Those congressmen who have already had town halls and such have been met with derision, laughter, catcalls and anger by the public.

Already, those who believe the health care bill will only lower quality and increase cost outnumber the people who think otherwise.

Obama is also seen in polls as failing to provide an effective economic stimulus, despite prodding Congress into borrowing $787 billion for it. And polls show the growing deficit has Americans increasingly concerned.

Obama may have set himself up for this fall by running last year as a centrist. He clearly is not, and is governing from a far-left position. Between the health care debacle, the stimulus boondoggle, the record deficits and the bailouts and heavy-handed incursions into the highest levels of the private sector, more and more Americans are concerned that the country is on the wrong track and headed for socialism.

Those of us who studied Barack Obama's record last year aren't surprised. He was schooled by socialists, and nothing in his scant legislative career indicated he would turn out to be anything else.

Moreover, most economists can tell you that a government-centric approach cannot drag a free-market economy out of the doldrums. Only time and a free people can do that; Obama has given us the opposite.

And while he has talked a good centrist, bipartisan game, Obama's "I won -- deal with it" approach has only worsened the partisan divide in Congress as he and Democratic leaders see little need for input from the loyal opposition.

No surprise there, either: Once the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, he has never shown a proclivity for working across the aisle.

In short, his personal charm was the only thing putting off the day of reckoning and America's slow realization that he's taking us down the wrong path. Now that his policies are being judged, though, his popularity is nosediving.

He has vastly overestimated his mandate, despite a slight margin of victory, as well as America's thirst for wholesale change of its time-tested institutions.

A vacation? It will likely help only if he comes back chastened and willing to -- dare we say it? -- change.