Speaking of the comparisons of Obama and FDR …
It’s dangerous any time a writer tries to write authoritatively about an issue with which he has little familiarity. Since Peter Beinart and I are the same age, I can say with some confidence that Beinart has no first-hand knowledge of New Deal era-America.
That doesn’t stop Beinart from making sweeping generalizations about that time period in his new TIME piece about the lessons President-elect Obama can learn from FDR:
By the time Roosevelt took office during the Great Depression, the entire ecosystem appeared to be in a death spiral, with Americans crying out for government to take control. F.D.R. did ? juicing the economy with unprecedented amounts of government cash, creating new protections for the unemployed and the elderly, and imposing rules for how industry was to behave. Conservatives wailed that economic freedom was under assault, but most ordinary Americans thanked God that Washington was securing their bank deposits, helping labor unions boost their wages, giving them a pension when they retired and pumping money into the economy to make sure it never fell into depression again. [Emphasis added.]
Crying out? Really? Is that why Roosevelt campaigned against Hoover’s interventionism in 1932, painitng himself as more fiscally conservative?
If “most ordinary Americans thanked God” for Roosevelt’s actions, why did he top 60 percent of the vote total once (1936), with declining victory margins in 1940 and 1944?
Roosevelt was undoubtedly popular. Even the future scourge of American liberals ? Ronald Reagan ? cast four votes for FDR. But Beinart’s case is overblown, based on what appears to be a mediocre public-school level of understanding of the Depression.
Perhaps his Council on Foreign Relations colleague Amity Shlaes could help him learn the real details.
