Our classless president in trying to make George W. Bush into a monster capitalist (something Mr. Compassionate Conservative never was) is not only ignoring history but rapidly becoming the stereotype that the Democrats made Herbert Hoover into. The last paragraph is priceless!
by Jonah Goldberg
‘Worst president since Hoover.”
Democrats have said this at one point or another about every Republican president since, well, Herbert Hoover. That’s because Democrats have been waiting for the resurrection of FDR like a cargo cult waiting for one last plane that never comes.
[….].
Which is why I’m beginning to think Barack Obama isn’t the next FDR — as so many promised — but the next Hoover.
The creation myth of the modern Democratic Party goes something like this: After years of capitalist excess, personified by Hoover’s “market fundamentalism,” Franklin Roosevelt introduced reasonable and pragmatic reforms that not only conquered the Great Depression but “saved democracy” itself.
Over the last two years, Obama and his defenders have constantly invoked this story to buttress the case for Obama’s “new foundation” — his version of a new New Deal.
Whatever the problems with this story — and there are many — the simple fact is that history has happened. We live with the consequences of the New Deal. Its institutions — Social Security, FDIC, etc. — are all around us, as are the progeny from the Great Society, another effort to replay the New Deal as if it was a new idea.
On liberals’ own terms, to argue that we need something like another New Deal or Great Society is to argue that these institutions either don’t exist or don’t work. But few, if any, liberals say anything like that. Instead, they change the subject. They talk about the Bush years as if they were a cross between a libertarian fantasy and an anarchist dystopia a la “Mad Max.”
[….]
For reasons fair and unfair, Obama, who inherited a bad recession and made it worse, every day looks more like a modern-day Hoover, whining about his problems, rather than an FDR cheerily getting things done. Inadequate to the task, Obama is discrediting the statism he was elected to restore.
The punch line? When the economy finally rebounds, it might be just in time for Obama’s replacement to get all the credit.
Read the rest: Is Bam the anti-FDR?