Paul Krugman comments on the fact that Obama has bought in to a right wing meme intended to discredit FDR. The argument they make is that FDR delayed taking action to deal with the Depression for six months, in order to build political support for the actions he eventually did take.
There’s no truth to the argument. The six months (actually 4 months, but right wingers aren’t very good at math either) in question is the period between his election and his inauguration, which was in March, not in January as it is now. During that time FDR refused to endorse and agree to stand by Hoover’s policies, which were not working, and which would not ever have worked. This meme ignores the hectic pace of the first 100 days (made possible, in part, by the fact that it only took 50 days to pass something in the Senate in those days of yore.) that I thought we all learned about in history class, but which Obama has somehow forgotten under the spell of some right wing revisionists.
It’s truly distressing that Obama has bought into this particular meme, as he has also bought in to the Reagan as great president meme. It’s particularly disheartening because in this particular case it’s rather gratuitous, as he apparently didn’t bother to check his facts. More disheartening, however, is that Obama is relying for advice on precisely the folks, the bankers and the financiers, to whom Hoover was listening and to whose orders FDR refused to march.
Obama has been pretty good about trying to reconcile the Federal government to scientific facts, but he’s not been terribly good about reconciling it with historical fact. If he’s not trying, in vain of course, to assuage the right by ignoring the roots of our current problems, he’s buying in to their skewed version of the past.
It’s dangerous to deny scientifically proven facts. It’s also dangerous to deny historical fact. Sometimes fake history becomes accepted as fact, becomes myth, and perhaps, does no terrible harm, depending on the myth. It probably does no harm if people believe George Washington couldn’t tell a lie, though even that is debatable. It does do real harm, however, if we fail to learn the lessons of the past, since, as the saying goes, we are then doomed to repeat them. The Depression is the time in the recent past most obviously comparable to today. If we misinterpret that time, then we risk the same failures. Unfortunately, we’re doing worse than FDR, since we have not repeated his successes, but we seem intent on repeating his mistakes (see, e.g., attempts to balance the budget in 1936). Besides the obvious fact that we have not repeated the job creation programs he created, we have not strengthened the working person’s rights, as FDR did, we have not passed legislation truly designed to avoid a repetition of the abuses that got us here, as FDR did, and Obama has not, as FDR did, provided a counterweight to the charlatans on the right (see, e.g., Father Coughlin/Glenn Beck), to which lack of leadership we owe the right’s ability to manipulate the fear inspired “tea party” people. It would help, as well, if one got the sense that there was a sense of urgency about the economic situation in Washington, but I don’t see it. I wasn’t around then, but I really don’t think Roosevelt spent much time worrying about government programs that might possibly run into small financial problems in 1965, rather than the millions of unemployed in 1932.
I always believed that Obama’s reelection was a sure thing, given the Republican field and the right wing crazies that have captured that party. I’m beginning to doubt that belief. Obama seems weirdly detached from the facts on the ground, unwilling to forcefully make a case for anything, unwilling to stand up for any principle, and unwilling to stray too far from the advice he gets from the people who got us into our current mess. It doesn’t help that he is willing to buy into right wing memes about the greatest Democratic president in the history of the party, particularly because it appears he actually believes this particular meme, and was not merely repeating it in yet another doomed attempt to curry favor with the Republicans.
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