FDR and Obama's chance

Once upon a time, I had a friend. I thought he was a good friend. We didn't talk much about politics.

We moved on. He, in fact, moved to Obama's birth state. I moved all over the place. We continued to correspond at Christmas.

At some point down the road he discovered my blog. He didn't like it. Turns out he was so far on the right he made Limbaugh look like a liberal and O'Reilly like a saint. Our country's problems are all due to the Democrats he said. Social Security and Medicare were programs devised by the Democrats to give a license for people to steal from the government.

Everywhere he looked, he saw liberal pinko commie fellow travelers. He decided I was one of them.

End of friendship.


Adam Cohen has written a book called Nothing to Fear (Penquin Press, $30 -- $22.46 at Barnes & Noble). John H. Richardson has a brief but brilliant review in the latest Esquire.

Here's Richardson's intro: "During the Great Depression, when 16 million people were out of work and 1.5 million were living in shantytowns, President Herbert Hoover insisted that the free market was the only engine of prosperity, that the poor were lazy, and the wealth would trickle down eventually--and the nation slid further and further into despair."

Phil Gramm, anybody?

Adam Cohen describes how FDR "turned that despair--and Hoover's failure--into hope." In the first 100 days, Franklin Delano Roosevelt "declared a national bank holiday, inspired the nation with the first of his famous fireside chats, and cut the federal budget by $500 million. ... one revolutionary new law followed another. With blinding speed, as one observer put it, 'a new standard of public decency was being set.'"


It wasn't easy. Cohen's description of Republicans is reminiscent of my friend and the Republican Party today. Republicans in the 1930s fought FDR tooth and nail trying to derail every single one of his attempts to put the nation back on track.

"They said famine relief would turn America into a nation of freeloaders, that capitalism would die without the gold standard. They called child-labor laws an intolerable intrusion on states' rights. During the debate over the Tennessee Valley Authority, so many power company executives denounced the 'socialist plan' that Congress had to schedule an extra day of hearings."

Cohen tells of a "remarkable group of social reformers," focusing on Frances Perkins who became FDR's secretary of labor.

In her earlier years, Perkins "lived in Hell's Kitchen settlement houses, where she saw women and children working 16-hour days in sweatshops and witnessed the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire. To her we owe the fire escape, the eight-hour day, the five-day week, and Social Security -- liberal innovations that helped save capitalism from itself, the last time liberals had to save it."


The names have changed. The Republican Party has not. Unfortunately, the Democrat Party has become a mere shell of what it used to be and is beholden now, like most Repugs, to lobbyists and their corporate bosses.

But out situation today is eerily familiar to anyone who lived through the Great Depression. Hope is fleeting. And it's going to get worse.

Obama has the chance to be this century's Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There is no question he's brilliant enough. The question is whether he has the requisite steel in the back and the requisite fire in his belly.

The Repugs will fight him every step of the way. That's why those of us who know a little history, laughed at McCain's campaign slogan, "Country First." The Republican Party didn't give a damn about the country in 1929 and most don't give a damn now.

But, as Obama knows, putting the country back on track has been done before and can be done again. It's his time and his chance.