Obama’s choice: FDR or Reagan?
Well, it may be Pat Buchanan saying it, but I still agree with him: Obama has a choice between the FDR approach to the Great Depression, policies that made it “greater”—that is, longer and more damaging—than it otherwise would have been; and the more successful Reagan approach to the recession of 1980.
But Buchanan ignores the one thing both FDR and Reagan had in common: an abiding optimism and the ability to convey it. They exuded confidence.
There is something very different and disturbing about Obama’s message, and that is his deep pessimism about America. Despite the lip service paid to the hope/change campaign message of uplift, his negativity comes through loud and clear.
Of course, Obama’s latest economic speech is being given in the context of trying to motivate legislation he will be proposing, especially his huge and controversial stimulus package, which jumps (rather than wades) into deep and uncharted waters. But if you read excerpts from his speech, you will see how extraordinarily gloomy it is, couched in the language of the dire consequences of what could happen if Obama’s plan isn’t realized.
The remedy? Why, big government, that’s what:
Mr. Obama insisted that only government could “break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy,” prevent “the catastrophic failure of financial institutions,” restart the flow of credit and restore the regulations needed to prevent such a crisis in the future.
Not only is big government the one and only answer, according to Obama, but the changes he proposes have to occur as soon as possible:
For every day we wait or point fingers or drag our feet, more Americans will lose their jobs,” Mr. Obama warned. “More families will lose their savings. More dreams will be deferred and denied. And our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”
For some contrast, let’s have the words of FDR in his First Inaugural, facing a situation far worse than that Obama faces today:
This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself””nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory…Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply…
We can argue over the proper policy to institute in order to deal with the financial crisis, and the Left and Right certainly will do so. But I don’t think there’s any argument about the fact that Obama is striking exactly the wrong tone, if economic recovery is what he is really after.
Your point may seem, to some, a minor point. I think it is major. Obama’s gloominess is Carteresque.
My dimestore amateur suspicion: it has to do with worldview, and with Obama and Carter (and Clinton)’s extreme narcissism. FDR and Reagan (and GWB) did not have such overt, extreme narcissism rearing it’s head. Ill winds could swirl, yet they were comfortable in their own skin, and in their own knowledge of who they were as human beings. Result: happy warriors. Obama and Carter (and Clinton) are only comfortable if they are publicly perceived in a certain (positive, adulatory) way.
gcotharn: yes, indeed, Carteresque.
Tone is very much the problem but it is part and parcel of a hackneyed plot. Obama’s secondhand economic solutions play as first act in this long running D.C. blockbuster.
Act II : The Excuse — It was too little too late.
Act III: The Great Solution — We need more, much, much more and we need it now.
Geopal is exactly correct. This is a set up for a long term (two term ?) program to get an evermore socialist agenda enacted. The sad part about it is that President Bush pretty much got the ball rolling with HIS stimulus package and the bailouts. We’ve all been sold down the river.
How is it liberal to shut off economic opportunity to the less developed world by cutting down American growth?
Locally I see the same brand of ‘I’ve got mine’ liberalism in play in liberal Marin County. If you look at Bay Area suburban population density (outside of Oakland and SF) the most liberal areas are the hardest to move to. Home prices and rents are higher and developers face a long list of obstacles to correct the situation. In Marin, they’re for the middle class. As long as they don’t move in the neighborhood.
Or, it could be Jimmy Carter.
You guys just aren’t hearing him right. This man and his demeanor are music to the ears of the poor defenseless planet before the filthy consuming human crowd.
Here comes “Stagflation”….
We arent going to get FDR, we are going to get worse. FDR didnt know the boundaries, and was a socialist spark in a mostly not socialist country. An FDR today would have seen many serous problems moved out of the way since last he was around, and techniques for accomplishing many of the same things, but not in such a blatant way as to be thrown out. however, the justices will be stacked in FDR2 favor, no?
I would pay attention to what other countries are doing… we are TOTALLY ignorant of the maneuvering into position that is going on.
if ya put it all together in one pile rather than drips and drabs with a lot missing, its not pretty.
and stimulating things by giving to the poor is an effort to helping companies without allowing them to be more capitalistic or fracture into more that are harder to control
FDR likes communism, Reagan was a VERY staunch anticommunist.
we are and everyone else is gearing up for the dog pile on the rabbit.. the idea that if all together move as one as things get worse, we will have no choice. either we get taken over from outside, or inside respond by taking us over for our own good in the crisis. if russia could stop gas to europe in a record cold wave, what would happen if say all the socialist oil producers refused to sell oil on credit to the west? could we ramp up? nope we are crippled.
same with manufacturing… if they said no more products on credit, or high terms, then what happens here? when factories left here, the supporting infrastructure around them collapsed. the tool and die makers, mold makers, parts suppliers, and the populations working expertise.
those two alone could collapse us down to what?
we always think we are safe because we think of war as tanks and bullets missiles and bombs..
but its winning by any means, in any way… even without bombs, even if everyone has to team up to do it… the US showed the power of a coalition, how each force could really be small and not strong, but together they were cheap and very effective.
we are actually vulnerable through our shipping… and on top of it, it only takes one bomb… one that isnt even lit off close enough to directly blast anything… just real high, off the eastern seaboard… and every electronic device we are using goes bzzzt…
we are capitalists… capitalism is a fragile system that relies on stability… for it war is not a good thing at all (despite the left).
just as credit has been over extended, in our haste to dress up a 10 year old as a full grown woman, rather than wait till she grows up, has made us extend ourselves to something that isnt ready for that extension yet. (and may never be).
there was no way to bribe them with things… they, like the catholic church are beyond things because where they are, its no longer relevent. there is no other purpose.
think on that for a second… that once you have control of eerything, the whole idea that we live under ceases to have purpose. there becomes even LESS meaning than in the west..
give em a billion… does their lives change? give them a trillion, then? they control all the resources, the idea is irrelevent… they dont love their serfs… but they do hate the forces that may and do threaten them in favor of their serfs.
capitalism makes slaves of kings, and kings of the slaves. communism returns us to the feudal era of lords in state, and everyone else.
they are beyond money… so what would stimulate such people to feel alive again? heck we got people here jumpiong off of buildings trying to be alive… maybe mr madoffs purpose was to bankrupt those that in the past would banroll the defense of the country? which is why he is always smirking… he is playing on a different level to something that may have given his life purpose and excitement, and everything we all crave…
better to be alive and die, to have never lived at all and exist.
the analogies to FDR may be closer than anyone thinks.
if FDR doesnt take this seriously the way the real FDR didnt take seriously foxes in the chicken coop..
the US has just reactivated the 4th navy… nukes are missing. everyone is getting in position for something… i said in earlier posts that everything was going to heat up real hot…
if you think its hot now, wait a little while… its going to get so hot, its going to get scary enough that the wimps that now inhabit the US will say save us, we will capitulate rather than…
it is a strategy that employs sophisticated new methods of warfare, opening new frontiers of battle. The war is waged through language, words and concepts. The war is waged through media and the influencing of vital institutions (including churches, universities, banks, publishing houses, organized crime and parliamentary government). The war is waged through trade, finance and the seduction of businessmen. It is waged by attacking Internet sites, by invading sensitive computer systems. There are many fronts in this war. Immediate measurements of conventional military strength are irrelevant, because the power of conventional forces can be augmented or reduced due to strategic successes in non-military theaters of action. It is even possible that America’s nuclear arsenal could be neutralized through non-military attacks.
problem is that we would have to make some drastic changes to meat such a threat… Today’s U.S. arsenal cannot even guarantee the destruction of the main military targets in Russia.
and what changes has obama promised here too, while we are crisis concerned for ourselves?
we live not in a country… but in a fort… each country is a fort… the more peaceful times are, the more they can sit with their gates wide open…
but woe betide the fort who fails to remember that they are a fort, and WHY they are not bothered.
From the standpoint of commercial civilization, atomic warfare is absurd. From the standpoint of atomic warfare, however, commercial civilization is absurd — in the same sense that mounted chivalry was absurd in the face of effective archery or gunpowder. For those who have deep bomb shelters, plenty of underground supplies, and the ruthlessness to sacrifice billions of lives, nuclear war might be viewed as an effective tool for sweeping away commercial civilization in favor of another type of civilization.
We should not pretend that mass murdering dictators have disappeared from history. Communists, anarchists and National Socialists long ago denounced commercial civilization as “bourgeois” or “Jewish.” It is a matter of record that Nazis and Communists killed over 100 million people in the twentieth century. Why would today’s totalitarian governments, in Moscow and Beijing, refrain from using nuclear weapons to achieve their objectives in the twenty-first century?
Russia’s hidden nuclear missiles (2000) (three years after yamentau mountain detailed below)
Clinton turned blind eye to major treaty violations
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17516
73 SS-23 missiles, packing a nuclear punch 365 times the bomb that detonated over Hiroshima, were hidden by the Soviets in violation of the INF Treaty, which went into force in June 1988.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_bomb
Declassified Russian sources indicate the smallest Soviet miniaturized nuclear weapon was of a similar size, being compared to a “small refrigerator” in dimensions; following the breakup of the Soviet Union, these were the type of devices Alexander Lebed claimed had been issued to the GRU and then subsequently lost. Lebed, a general who worked with Yeltsin, presented to US Congress the idea that ‘suitcase bombs’ were created by the Russians, and that in 1997 132 KGB produced suitcase bombs could not be accounted for[1]
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Later testimony however insinuated that the suitcase bombs had been under the control of the KGB and not the army or the atomic energy ministry, so they might not know of their existence.
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The Russian government’s statements on this matter have been contradictory. First they denied that such weapons had ever existed; then they said that all of them had been destroyed. However, the highest-ranking GRU defector Stanislav Lunev confirmed that such Russian-made devices do exist and described them in more detail [3].
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According to Lunev, the number of “missing” nuclear devices (as found by General Lebed) “is almost identical to the number of strategic targets upon which those bombs would be used”. He suggested that they might be already deployed by the GRU operatives.
and remember the chinese tested killer satellite which can knock out our gps, and our comsats, while leaving glosnast going… (our shooting a missile up to do this is not as good as their unknown number of satellites that are equipped).
we have no defense against a few missiles off the coast fired from near panama, cuba, the carribean… or when the backfire bombers are making their runs at our defenses (they are doing that now), and launch one or two high aerial ones for magnetic pulse but no destruction.
instant starvation given just in time delivery and no working cars, trucks, trains, or anything..
[ny city only has about 4 days of food, its amazing but that much moves in to maintain a city of 8 million]
more key to an end is making everyone miserable, and so circumstances could dictate. in other words any smart conqueror would not want to hurt the golden goose…
ergo the move into all these other theaters, and we dont believe it. under their own papers (www.terrorism.com/documents/TRC-Analysis/unrestricted.pdf), everything is war. including putting things in toys, and foods…
how many kids are now developmentally stunted by such things and so diminish the capacity of the US? 40 years of propaganda till our kids would fight for them more than for their own.
and then how about the fact that they just upgraded this within the past decade..
Yamentau Mountain
http://www.fas.org/news/russia/1997/bmd970404a.htm
in 1997.. only 11 years ago… (we are just in 2009)
“The rationale for the Yamantau complex is unclear.”
yeah… like why build lots and lots of HUGE nuclear bunkers near big cities in the past decade?
“It shows they take the threat of nuclear war so seriously that they’re willing to spend scarce resources on it,”
Russian press reports say the underground facility at Yamantau Mountain covers an area as large as the Capital Beltway.
care to see how large the capital beltway is?
The Clinton administration has been providing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Russia to help Moscow dismantle its nuclear arsenal. Despite the aid, the CIA report shows that the Russians are building both defensive and offensive strategic facilities and weapons, including a new type of long-range strategic missile and a new strategic missile submarine.
Inside Russia’s magic mountain
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17518
Today, Russia may be conducting nuclear deception on a far vaster scale beneath Yamantau Mountain, where it has dug out a gigantic underground military complex designed to withstand a sustained nuclear assault. U.S. intelligence sources tell WorldNetDaily that the Yamantau complex is but one of some 200 secret deep underground nuclear war-fighting sites in Russia, many of which have been significantly upgraded over the past six years at a cost of billions of dollars.
a sprawling underground complex that spans an area as large as Washington, D.C., inside the Beltway — some 400 square miles.
“The only potential use for this site is post-nuclear war,” Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md
The Yamantau Mountain complex is located close to one of Russia’s remaining nuclear weapons labs, Chelyabinsk-70, giving rise to speculation it could house either a nuclear warhead storage site, a missile base, a secret nuclear weapons production center, a directed energy laboratory or a buried command post. Whatever it is, Yamantau was designed to survive a nuclear war.
“They have very large train tracks running in and out of it, with enormous rooms carved inside the mountain. It has been built to resist a half dozen direct nuclear hits, one after the other in a direct hole. It’s very disquieting that the Russians are doing this when they don’t have $200 million to build the service module on the international space station and can’t pay housing for their own military people,” he said.
The very little that is known publicly about the site comes from Soviet-era intelligence officers, who defected to Great Britain and the United States. In public testimony before a House Armed Services Subcommittee last October, KGB defector Col. Oleg Gordievsky said the KGB had maintained a separate, top-secret organization, known as Directorate 15, to build and maintain a network of underground command bunkers for the Soviet leadership — including the vast site beneath Yamantau Mountain.
“And what is interesting,” said Gordievsky, was that President Yeltsin and Russia’s new democratic leaders “are using those facilities, and the same service is still running the same facility, like it was 10, 15 years ago.”
got to put EVERYTHING together to assess things.
OT, but a good one:
As Vanderleun would say:
Your own petard. Ass. Hoist.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123146299905466537.html
Please see this thread on this very subject, by Wretchard of The Belmont Club:
“Where’s the bottom?”
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/01/08/wheres-the-bottom/#more-1787
Thought-provoking post, and fascinating (if grim) responses.
This post on the Belmont Club is worth repeating in full:
“Old Chief:
After much observation, I have decided that when otherwise bright people appear to be doing something obviously stupid, it is not because they are stupid. It is because they have goals not made public. The cover goal may be stupid, but it is publicly acceptable. The real purpose is quite clever, but not publicly acceptable.
Example? Disarming the people in order to reduce crime is demonstrably stupid; indeed, counterproductive. The folks advocating general disarmament are not stupid. Therefore, they have another purpose other then the stated one.
Another? Yielding to the demands of terrorists just gets you more terrorism. You can easily name several other examples.
What could that be? I just wonder.
So, spending 2.8 trillion dollars (or whatever the number is today) to ’stimulate’ the economy is obviously stupid. One does not correct the ravages of excessive debt by going into more debt. What could be the real purpose?
My theory is that the Chicago Way is to move very large amounts of money around very fast, distributing it in a way to secure the future of selected politicians, and guaranteeing that political power remains in the hands of selected groups. We, the people, will be distracted by razzle-dazzle and never know what happened to our money, or our freedom.
You will only slowly come to realize that you are poorer and more enslaved. The politicians will then call for a new, improved program which will lead to more poverty and less freedom.
Obama will make Madoff look like a picker. Hell, he will make FDR, who installed the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all, “Social Security,” look like a piker.
Then, everybody will get the government they deserve.” # # #
I think he’s got it. The more fear BO whips up, the easier this will be for him to accomplish: socializing the great Mercantile Power, castrating us, and locking down power for the Left for the foreseeable future. The Leftists’ erotic daydream, the great goal of all their striving–to take down the Free, Capitalist Superpower, and arrogate all that power to themselves.
nice job, Beverly!
Actually the left and presumably Obama pride themselves on this pessimism as a sign of their superior intelligence. Here’s a remarkable example of this conceit from Matt Yglesias. Like Obama, he’s a Harvard graduate, so you know he’s got to be smart.
Sometimes the goal is simply denial. Sometime’s it’s denial that there’s evil in the world. Sometime’s it’s denial that things sometimes work backwards: you have to treat bad people badly to make them behave. But denial is a dangerous force, and an irresponsible one.
Beverly,
“My theory is that the Chicago Way is to move very large amounts of money around very fast, distributing it in a way to secure the future of selected politicians, and guaranteeing that political power remains in the hands of selected groups.”
You are exactly right and it is more than theory. This is the way business is done in Chicago. This is why Chicago, of all the major cities, suffers the least from work stoppages/strikes, even threats are minimal. More bribes, deals, understandings, financial back scratching, and palm greasing takes place here than anywhere else and the quid pro quo is power, entrenched power. Things may slow down a bit though, as many of the wheeler dealers have made their way to DC and more are on their way.
Neo, Obama’s “tone” is entirely irrelevant. Herbert Hoover consistently struck a cheery, optimistic tone as the economy sunk into the Great Depression. All it did was make him look like a chump.
Our economy is choked to the gills with toxic debt. It will sink like a stone until that debt has worked its way through the system. There’s nothing Obama or anyone else can do about it.
2dave wrote, “It will sink like a stone until that debt has worked its way through the system”
What? You mean it won’t sink like a stone until Obama creates a 2 trillion dollar deficit trying to spend our way out of it? 🙂
The debt being there is a huge problem. Opportunity is created when jobs are created. The private sector could create more jobs than the federal government by leaps and bounds with the right policies …
When you have a government PICKING winners and losers (auto bailout) that is counter productive to people feeling like they can invest in strong companies with any confidence. nobody knows the value of anything as compared to others.
To paraphrase: “We have nothing to fear but” the fear-mongers themselves!
Nick