January 12th 2009
As BHO Channels FDR, Worries Grow
L
ast week the Token Dem – a mighty Obama supporter – sent me this news item with the email subject line, “And the news in this is where?”
Obama Uses Poll, Focus Groups to Sell Stimulus Plan to Congress
By Lorraine Woellert and Hans Nichols
Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) — President-elect Barack Obama’s top political aides are transplanting their campaign tactics to the policy arena, using data from polls and focus groups to shape the debate over a stimulus plan that may cost at least $775 billion.
David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political adviser, along with campaign media adviser Jim Margolis, are encouraging lawmakers to use the word “recovery” instead of recession, and “investment” instead of “infrastructure.” Those recommendations came from focus-group research indicating that such framing would make the package more appealing to voters.
The Obama camp is trying to build support for the stimulus proposals, which have encountered resistance from lawmakers of both parties over size and cost.Republicans have employed similar tactics in past policy debates, notably when they labeled the estate tax as the “death” tax in arguing for its repeal.
“Not unlike news organizations, we poll public attitudes about where the economy is,” Robert Gibbs, Obama’s choice for White House press secretary, said in an interview. “We’re not polling to see what should be in an economic-recovery plan.”
Axelrod and Margolis briefed Senate Democratic leaders yesterday morning and their House counterparts at lunch today on the details of the research, participants in the meetings said.
Like the Token Dem said, where is the news here? Well, it’s not in the polling and it’s not even in the fact that the Obama team is planning a campaign-like putsch to get the economic plan through. Given Obama’s flittery past, what does he know to do but campaign? No, the only news is that the campaign to pass the Obama stimulus package is now going full-barrel.
That was evident yesterday when Barack “America only has one president at a time” Obama hit the Sunday morning news circuit, choosing Clintonista George Stephanopolous and ABC for the occasion. There was other news in the show (here, here) but Obama’s agenda was clearly to stimulate the stimulus:
It’s going to take some time to fix it. But what we tried to do was put forward a plan that says, let’s act boldly, let’s act swiftly. Let’s not only provide a jump-start to the economy and immediately create or save 3 million jobs, but let’s also put a down payment on some of the structural problems that we have in our economy.
Not exactly “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” eh?
And today the campaign used the big print outlets, like the NYT:
WASHINGTON — It is still a week before he takes office, yet President-elect Barack Obama is everywhere: on the Sunday talk shows, on radio and YouTube, on Capitol Hill, drawing on the techniques he employed during the campaign and lessons from predecessors as he seeks to shape public attitudes about the economic downturn.
His aides said Mr. Obama had studied the way Franklin D. Roosevelt approached the first 100 days of his presidency, and in particular had seized on the notion of Roosevelt having a “conversation with the American public” to try to prepare it for a difficult time. He has, aides said, even looked at the words Roosevelt used and the tone he struck.
There he goes, studying words again, proof that Obama and his gang still believe there are magic words that drive public opinion and get things done. I used to think that way, too, but realized when I was younger than Obama that everyone has their magic words and they cancel each other out.
To hone his messaging for his economic plan (I think they’re going to call it the “Big Deal”), Obama is studying Roosevelt, reading The Defining Moment by Jonathan Alter. It’s a perfect Obama book, since its subtitled, “FDR’s 100 days and the triumph of hope.” As you can imagine, this is a book that sees the New Deal as a great success, one of the high points of our history. As one Amazon reviewer wrote,
I enjoyed the way Alter described FDR’s Presidency, and how those hundred days (and the next 4000+ days) really were a triumph of hope for people. Franklin Roosevelt, the man, took (as Alter put it) the “dying ember” of hope and transmutated it into a brilliant, glowing fire showcasing the American spirit and the desire to rebound from the depths of the Great Depression.
One wonders whether anyone in Obamaland is reading Amity Schlaes’ The Forgotten Man, to gain a different and very necessary perspective on FDR and the New Deal. Or are they only in search of positive words and not particularly interested in studying downsides?
I’m approaching half-way through Schlaes’ book and a bit back I took to putting a note in whenever I saw something Roosevelt was up to that sounded a lot like Obama. There have been quite a few, like this one, that reflects Obama’s ability to never be nailed down:
At points in the campaign Roosevelt declared himself for “sound money,” by which most people assumed he meant a gold-backed currency. But he was ambivalent. (Kindle location 2258-62 [Kindles don't have page numbers because you can change the type size.])
Or this one, which reminds us that like FDR, Obama has little faith in economic growth without the government heavy-handedness of forced redistribution.
It was a time for the “princes of property,” the wealthy, to share their resources. Growth would not provide for the poor only redistribution would. (2278-82)
Here’s a passage that defines the arrogance of FDR’s brain trust and the FDR team’s eagerness to hang blame for everything on Hoover – much as Obama seems to be courting a massive blame Bush effort:
Hoover wrote a formal letter to the manufacturer to put on record what the man had reported to his secretary: “I beg to acknowledge your telephone message received through Mr. Joslin, as follows: ‘Professor Tugwell, advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, had lunch with me. He said they were fully aware of the bank situation and that it would undoubtedly collapse in a few days, which would place the responsibility in the lap of President Hoover.’” (2392-95)
Indeed, America seems to have “one president at a time” when Obama wants blame to fall on President Bush, but the PEOTUS becomes the POTUS when it serves Obama’s interests.
This passage could just as well be describing the true believers laboring mightily in the newly minted Office of the President Elect:
The brain trusters were ferociously busy and in an expansive mood … (2398-2402)
That “expansive” refers specifically to their thinking about the size of government, and with Obama thinking about tripling the national debt, we see nothing much has changed here.
And finally, this paragraph in particular troubled me as it reflects a terrifying trait I see in Obama – the echoes of FDR’s willingness to blindly manipulate the economy, trying whatever new ideas came to mind, as if the economy were a mere plaything, not the nation’s lifeblood and sustenance:
[Ray Moley] later would write his own … analysis, saying that the surprise at beholding Roosevelt “arose chiefly from the wonder that one man could have been so flexible as to permit himself to believe so many things in so short a time. But to look upon these policies as the result of a unified plan was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.” (3253-56)
I understand why Obama is reading Alter instead of Schlaes, but I don’t forgive it. There is a tendency to believe what we want to believe so we tend to select our reading to support what we want to believe. For pajama-clad bloggers, that’s sin enough, but for an incoming president-elect facing dire economic times, it’s inexcusable.
Obama is filling his head with images of Lincoln and tales of FDR’s greatness, and not even bothering to pretend for public consumption that he’s seeking different points of view. He may succeed in having us use “recovery” instead of “recession,” but his actions to date have done nothing to convince me that the most common usage won’t be in headlines like this: “Recovery Nowhere In Sight.” That’s the price we’ll all pay because he hasn’t studied the real history of FDR and the consequences of New Deal experimentation and policies.
So he’s going in half-cocked. And as a result, he says things like this:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me press you on this, at the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency some kind of a grand bargain? That you have tax reform, health care reform, entitlement reform, including Social Security and Medicare where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?
OBAMA: Yes.
Shudder.
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