Two North Carolina residents landed letters in today’s WSJ, commenting on Peggy Noonan’s column of last Saturday, M.B. Blankenship, Jr. and me.

LETTERS
It Is Noble to Hold to One’s Ideals

Regarding Peggy Noonan’s “The Off-Center President” (Declarations, Feb. 13): Although the president may be the wrong man with the wrong ideas, there is something admirable in his willingness to sacrifice the politics of electability for the statesmanship of ideals. Isn’t this the ideal taught in our civics classes?

M.B. Blankenship Jr.

Woodleaf, N.C.

I agree with Peggy Noonan’s argument that the president is “off-center” but she is utterly mistaken in asserting that President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration “took a new and different path.”

The standard leftist narrative about our history holds that President Herbert Hoover was a die-hard laissez-faire advocate who wouldn’t budge from his capitalist convictions even as the nation’s economy spun into the Great Depression. The truth is that Hoover was a “big government conservative” who believed that aggressive federal economic intervention would speed recovery and reduce suffering. He specifically rejected the advice of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon that the best policy would be the same as President Warren Harding had pursued after the sharp 1920-21 recession: to cut taxes, cut federal spending and allow market adjustments to proceed unimpeded.

FDR did not take the country down a different path, but accelerated rapidly down the failed, counter-productive statist path Hoover had chosen. The parallels between the Hoover-Roosevelt era and the Bush-Obama era are striking.

George C. Leef

Raleigh, N.C.

To Mr. Blankenship, I say, that it may be noble to sacrifice of yourself for your ideals, but Obama intends to sacrifice the liberty and property of millions of Americans who want no part of his grand schemes. That is not noble.