When I write about Franklin Roosevelt, my grandfather, I generally avoid comparing him to President Obama. However, especially since the Democrats' debacle in last November's elections--a sharp contrast to FDR leading the party to substantial gains in his first mid-term election in 1934--I feel a searching comparison could be useful as we look forward to 2012. How did FDR, presiding over a country still in deep economic depression, succeed in rallying Americans behind him, and why can't Obama seem to do the same?
Obama's economic advisors--all of whom come from the culture of Wall Street--have convinced him that challenging the business community too sharply would impinge on economic recovery. He has also carefully avoided criticism of the Bush Administration, I suppose because he wished to make a great point of reaching across the aisle to his Republican opposition. He has thus deprived himself of making plain who was responsible for the Great Recession. The legacy President Obama inherited from the Bush administration shortly became his own, and the American people never got a true sense of his values.
FDR expressed his values. The destructiveness of lust, anger and greed was apparent to him, and he didn't back off from referring to the greed of those on Wall Street whose actions had created the Great Depression.
At his first inauguration address--before he had set foot in the White House--Roosevelt said that, "...[T]he rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated."
He continued,
Practices of the unscrupulous moneychangers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. ... Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.
Obama, on the other hand, is not conveying to the American people where he stands, what he is for and what he is against. Although his administration has made great strides in financial reform, his priority still seems to be to support the business community.
His inaugural address in 2009 did include criticism. "Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age," Obama said. However, his criticism was passive--"on the part of some"--and he immediately undercut his point ("but also"). Unlike Roosevelt, he did not specifically denunciate those who caused the crisis.
FDR made it clear where he stood on basic issues. His attitude towards people and their communities is the root, I think, of the famed "coalition" of voting groups on which the Democratic Party prospered for a good number of years.
The present administration in the White House seems instead to be imitating the Hoover administration in its last year. Hoover was not unaware of the deep plight of the nation, but his faith in "free enterprise" prevailed over his humanitarian experience. Capping Hoover's final year in the White House were his last-minute efforts to intervene. He gathered Wall Street's senior bankers in the East Room and detailed what they had to do. All nodded affirmatively and murmured agreement, and then proceeded to ignore their President, carrying on business as usual.
(The extraordinary investigation into the banking community's malfeasance by Ferdinand Pecora, the chief counsel to the Senate banking committee, was well over when I began to absorb lessons of the financial crisis of the 1920s and '30s from the conversation at the dinner table. I do, however, remember one occasion when no less than the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of the Interior and the President of the United States detailed to me Pecora's exposure of the financial community.)
FDR's more conservative economic counselors advised him to avoid "make work" programs. His reply was an address to the nation:
To those who say our expenditures for Public Works and other means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.
The New Deal was a legislative feat that has never since been matched by any president. The key--how the president used the power of his office to shape public opinion--should not be overlooked. Some may deride this use of power as "the bully pulpit," but it is simply how a president can, and should, pick his enemies, especially when he can focus on people and institutions that have pulled down our capitalist system through their unbridled greed. FDR recognized that confrontation is not only a necessary tool, it is an essential political one.
While Obama has avoided "make work," I presume as a matter of economic principle, his efforts to foster infrastructure programs have languished, putting few people to work, bogged down by bureaucratic paperwork, even though, in less pressing circumstances, some of it--like environmental impact studies--would be useful. But the sense of urgency in getting people into jobs seems not to be a White House priority.
To my dismay, Obama has instead catered to the business and financial community. Not only am I deeply disappointed, but I am also puzzled, bothered and bewildered. For a person who holds such obvious personal values--ones with which I can identify--I don't understand how the President has swallowed the notion that he must placate Wall Street.
The Depression hovered like a grey cloud over the nation right up until we began arming for WWII. The New Deal didn't change that. As Roosevelt himself said in his second inaugural address, "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." But our citizens were not looking at the economic numbers. They knew their President was with them. They knew what he was for and what he was against. FDR's attitude of caring was evident. And it was the basis of his rapport with the American people, and for his re-elections in 1936, 1940 and 1944.
If Barack Obama is only a one-term president it will be because he has failed to establish this rapport.
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a) the gross failure of the "War on Terror" model generally and
b) the failure of Republicans after 6 years of prosecuting that war, with torture, to do the job.
Names must be named and the people and policies that have brought America so low need to be identified and clearly rejected. A mush-mouthed, non-committal discourse enables those who failed America so badly to pretend neither they nor their bankrupt policies are to blame.
Comfortable for those people, but a terrible oversight for the country.
We can only wish someone would have reminded Obama, of FDR's ability to relate to and speak with the People, as well as the history of Lyndon Johnson's bullying to pass Medicare. Whether it was FDR, Johnson or Kennedy, they always took the path of how to do something, call out the culprits causing the crises and always, always tell the people, in their own words, why and what they set out to do.
I can't believe that President Obama didnot speak to the "people" with his own weekly national press conferences, for the first two years. The most critical period of his administration. All I heard, was what his W.H. press and others were telling us--ie., why he won't let happen to him with health care policy, what happened to Clinton, or why he doesn't want to be a "one term" president like "Carter", and why he wants a bi-partisan bill.
FDR gained the trust of the people, because he trusted them! So, the people gave him the baton for 4 administrations to "speak" for them, in everything he did!
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This is sarcasm, right?
For anyone who doesn't get the reference, Google Magog and Comics.
Mrs Obama is just terrific, and her efforts to get kids more healthy and less obese will be part of her lasting legacy. Beautiful and smart, we're lucky to have her along with our smart, good president.
What is remarkable about FDR and what he was able to do along with wonderful Eleanor and his team was to actually betray the high class he came from by doing what he did. Those rich conservatives still rankle with his alphabet programs and are constantly trying to abolish them.
1.) "Although his administration has made great strides in financial reform", (what reform?, what strides?)
and
2.) "obvious personal values", (they aren't so obvious or there would be no need for this article).
----Yet another right wing revisionist/obfuscator....
One can only hope Obama would emulate FDR. Speak plainly and follow up with decisive action but that has not been evident.
So from that perspective, his "we the people" rhetoric may have been satisfying,but it didn't work.
Don't know if Obama will do better or worse but following Roosavelt isn't a panacea.
The problem was that Roosevelt was too conservative to spend on the scale needed to bring the economy back. In 1929, the GNP was $103 billion. By '33, that had dropped to $56 billion. Using a multiplier of 3.5 (a standard economic assumption), he would have needed to spend an additional $13.9 billion to bring the GNP back to where it stood. The total spending never exceeded $8.8 billion until war preparedness forced him to spend on a truly Keynesian scale.