Another FDR? Not Quite

UPDATES, 11-6-06:

HuffPost's Rahm Emanuel Big News Page

HuffPost's Obama's Cabinet Big News Page

Rahm Emanuel: Obama's Chief Of Staff

Rahm Emanuel: Obama Chief Of Staff (Slideshow)

Tim Dickinson: Rahm Emanuel And David Axelrod: The Closest Of Friends (11-5-06)

Rahm Emanuel Endorses Obama (7-4-08)

Rahm Emanuel's original post:

On September 24, Michael Gerson discussed President Bush's response to the financial crisis and said that he and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had "assumed the mantle of Franklin D. Roosevelt." Praising the president for merely attempting to clean up the mess he helped make is one thing, but comparing him to Roosevelt is quite another.

Indeed, this is not the first time President Bush and his allies have made this comparison. It is revealing, but not in the way Mr. Bush's supporters intended. FDR inherited a country divided by the Depression and united it as a war loomed; on Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush inherited a country that longed to be united and further divided it. FDR inherited a depression and gave America the greatest expansion of the middle class it has ever known. Mr. Bush inherited the longest economic boom in U.S. history and gave the middle class the highest anxiety in memory. FDR left an enduring legacy and was revered by Americans for decades. Mr. Bush has left the American people desperate for change.

Clearly, the favorable comparison to FDR that Mr. Bush would hope for is at odds with history and the facts. And if the president does not show real leadership in the coming days, history is more likely to compare him to another president -- Herbert Hoover.

This article originally appeared at The Washington Post.

Comments

[Agent420]

If the world court wants to have a go at the out going administration. We should provide first class transportation for them.

[Agent420]

Why are you insulting Herbert Hover? You don't like his vacuum cleaners?

[veracity]

Dear Rep. Emanuel - All well and good. But John McCain was not the only "Keating Five" senator taking money from Charles Keating to RUN INTERFERENCE in Washington on Keating's behalf - ALL FOUR of the other Keating-5 senators _were Democrats._

Your boss, Speaker Pelosi's Pelosi/Pau­lson/Bush/­Goldman-Sa­chs/Morgan­-Chase/Cit­i/BoA bailout bill - fully one _trillion_ dollars of (excuse the shouting) NEW DEBT piled on top of the nation's already maxed-out national credit card - is another Democratic page in the financial loot, plunder, and insider trading corruption that got us into both the 1980 Savings & Loan Crisis, and the current credit meltdown (which is being blamed on low-income home buyers - sheer hogwash).

Just because the Wall St. and financial crowd goes running to Washington pleading for welfare, doesn't mean our Congress should fork over more taxpayer loot, without even holding basic hearings.

The 110th Congress has done very little to prevent a repeat of the 1980s S&L crisis - which were explained pretty simply back in the early 1990s in "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings & Loans" and Michael Waldman's "Who Robbed America?"

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Job-Looting-Americas-Savings/dp/006098600X
http://www.amazon.com/Who-Robbed-America/dp/B000EQ1IME

[Overd0g]

Unfortunately, FDR's policies made the depression last much longer than it should have. Hopefully we won't get WW3 to "save" us, like WW2 did FDR's legacy.

[jerseywolf]

What a shockingly ignorant comment.

[veracity]

Ok, Overdog, dispute this: THE HALLMARKS of GETTING OUT of the Great Depression were -

#1. HIGH WAGES -
#1a. - aka _UNION_ WAGES, UNION MEMBERSHIP was at its highest rate EVER after WWII;
#2. HIGH EMPLOYMENT,
#3. SOCIAL SECURITY keeping the nation's elderly OUT of the abject poverty rolls (and, literally, out of the street where they would die if they couldn't pay the rent);
#4. GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT of banks, financial markets, securities, and especially the consumer-accessible stock-market...
#5. MASSIVE GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT in CIVILIAN INFRASTRUCTURE -
- ESPECIALLY America's PUBLIC ROADS AND HIGHWAYS..
America's INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM is not only THE BIGGEST CONSTRUCTION PROJECT in human history - it was based on the _SOCIALIZED_ German model - the AUTOBAHN - that US GI's saw at the end of WWII.
#6. GI BILL and MASSIVE GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT in public and HIGHER EDUCATION...

EVERY ONE of the above is THE BEDROCK FOUNDATION of AMERICA-th­e-SUPERPOW­ER that Righties STEAL CREDIT FOR.

Take away STRICT, ENERGETIC OVERSIGHT of the markets - YOU WILL GET A MARKET CRASH _EVERY TIME_.




IF you like a BANANA REPUBLIC LOW-WAGES DICTATORSHIP, why don't you move to Mexico or Saudi Arabia? (Saudis import Pakistanis, Bengalis, and other _cheap_ contract labor, who are expelled from the country as soon as their service is terminated.)

[StPeteDoc]

The comparison by Michael Gerson of George W. Bush to Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the result of cobbled logic, fallacious reasoning, and misguided thinking. To even utter the names of Roosevelt and Bush in the same sentence, to put it simply, is just, well, crazy. Gerson's analysis is the purest form of comparing apples with oranges.

Here's my thinking on this. To date, we've had forty-three presidents. If you rank them from highest to lowest, in terms of overall performance, Bush eeks in at number forty-six. That's right, my numbers aren't wrong - he's even worse than the next three presidents who haven't even been elected yet.

[rich misty]

How about Captain Kangaroo

[pixy242a]

Whatever we think of W, I wonder at the state of mind of his supporters, even supposedly educated elites like media analysts. After 9/11 some of them referred to him as Churchill !

Now Palin is the new Reagan. Reagan was not a great mind (though an affable guy, who could actually write and speak coherently), but has been elevated to mythic status by the Right during the last 15 years.

[Kindheart]

George can think whatever he wants as to which president he is most like, however, the American people know that he will go down in history as the worse president. He is a pathetic man.
I hope with the change coming and a Democratic Congress, our lives will get better.

[wild1a]

It was April 12th, 1945 and I was repairing a radar unit on a seaplane patrol bomber (PBM5) in the fleet anchorage in Kerama Retto during the Okinawa campaign. We'd been in place there since March 28. Kamikazi and bombing raids were frequent. Tokyo Rose would frequently refer to discrete naval units in the area that she promised would be attacked. This day while I worked I was listening to her on the aircraft radio and she announced that our President had died. I was 7 years old when he became President. The word "President" meant Roosevelt. I felt a sense of loss I could not explain. Tokyo Rose offered her condolences and played requiem music.

[Rog49Thomas]

If the arsonist stays to help put out the fire he set, he doesn't become a hero.

[ThermoChemist]

How Bush stacks up against FDR
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/20/73653/7046

Starting Economy
- FDR comes in with an enormous depression that left the nation's economy in ruins.
- GWB slipped into office with a record government surplus.

Starting Military
- FDR; every weapon system in the army was either outdated, or simply non-functional. There were very few experienced officers, and most men were poorly trained and equipped.
- GWB was gifted with a great US military (with "smart" weapons and advanced aircraft). American soldiers were the best trained on the planet.

The Enemy
FDR enemies initially had more soldiers, ships, tanks, and planes than the US; with enormous industrial resources.
GWB's enemy was a small, irregular force of less than 10,000 poorly trained men; with NO air force, navy, and minimal artillery.

CONCLUSION:
Starting from almost nothing Roosevelt managed to defeat the two largest militaries in the world less than four years after Pearl Harbor, while building up the economy, and putting in place a social safety net that protected every American.

Five years since September 11th, Bush hasn't even managed to defeat an enemy two hundred times smaller than the one Roosevelt faced. An enemy with no factories to make weapons, no economy to keep them going, not even a country to call their own. For all that, Bush has let them run circles around the greatest military ever created through his boneheaded tactics. [not to mention the economy, corruption­/scandals, etc.]

[tiggersthotfulspot]

Clinton was no FDR either. He signed all of Phil Gramm's awful deregulation bills and the 1996 Telecom "Reform" Bill that gave us Clear Channel (Conservative All the Time) Radio.

[ThermoChemist]

LINCOLN
Civil War: Lincoln appropriated powers no previous President had wielded: suspended the writ of habeas corpus, spent money without congressional authorization, and imprisoned 18,000 suspected Confederate sympathizers without trial. Nearly all of his actions, although vehemently denounced by the Copperheads, were subsequently upheld by Congress and the Courts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln

Hmm. I guess there ARE some similarities (!?!)

TRUMAN
Truman built NATO; Bush built the coalition of the willing (Poland, Romania, Azerbaijan, etc...).
Truman launched the Marshall Plan; Bush launched the Halliburton Plan.
Truman fought the Cold War; Bush fights the "Long War" (the 9/11-Afgha­nistan-Ira­q "bait-and-switch")
Truman: Voracious reader; checked out half the Library of Congress.; Bush: Married a librarian.
Truman: As US Senator took on war profiteers; Bush, as President gave no bid contracts to Halliburton.
Truman: Worked a real farm; Bush, vacations on a "pretend" ranch.
Truman was a veteran who fought in Europe during WWI and ended a war during his presidency; Bush was a chickenhawk who drank in Texas during Vietnam and started a war during his presidency.

Bush is always flip-flopping on which President he's potentially "most like". I think he's tried: Lincoln, FDR, Truman, LBJ.

[shaytoonee]

Excellent argument. I hope u get on TV 24/7 for Barack Obama bc u are an excellent surrogate. Ive seen u in action and ur great. keep up the job and fight back the smears

[benjaminblue]

You are so right! Mr. Bush expects praise for "fixing" another bad situation he helped create. He expects praise, even though it's our money, not his management skill, that he used to resolve the problem. It's like his vanity war all over again. He wasted billions of our dollars (and thousands of American lives) to create an abysmal problem, and then he wasted billions more dollars (and lives) with his surge, and he expects to be lauded for his leadership.

I'm ready to give credit where credit is due. I give Mr. Bush credit for creating many messes. And that is all I am ready to give him credit for, now or ever. The only reward Mr. Bush deserves is the chance for him to try to defend his inane, immoral, illegal actions in front of a jury, and then he should be incarcerated for the rest of his miserable life, after being forced to refund all the taxpayer money he pocketed withoug permission through his criminal deeds.

[jwb]

And let's not forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and the millions who are displaced.