Alan Brinkley, an FDR biographer and a professor of history at Columbia University, said in an interview that “Roosevelt was much more willing to attack his opponents, even when unfairly, to strengthen his political position.”
“Obama’s efforts at reasonable, conciliatory rhetoric have been a failure in this political climate, and he has not yet persuaded me that he has it in him to take on his opponents with the same ferocity that they attack him,” Brinkley said.
H.W. Brands, another Roosevelt biographer, notes that, unlike Obama, FDR “had carte blanche to rectify the economy because he became president after the country became in full-blown depression.”
“Americans were willing to give FDR that luxury,” he added.
It’s true that the economy may not have been bad enough for Obama to have the opportunity to launch truly transformational reforms, but the president also deprived himself of that chance by not adopting bold initiatives after the passage of the stimulus.
No doubt, Obama gets credit for one major policy achievement: steps toward universal health coverage. But it’s not hard to imagine that FDR would be opposed to the terms of the debt deal Obama is negotiating. Moreover, he would be distressed to know that a Democrat was letting Republicans chip away at the centerpiece of his progressive agenda.
Ironically, with his embrace of budget cuts as part of a possible solution to the debt standoff, Obama may commit a mistake similar to one Roosevelt made. When FDR halted funding for some of his social programs in the late 1930s, the result was what some historians call the “Roosevelt Recession,” which stunted the nation’s recovery from the Great Depression. If Obama’s decision leads to another economic downturn, he will have adopted only the least admirable aspect of Roosevelt’s legacy.
“We hoped [Obama] would live up to his billing as the next FDR and initiate a new New Deal; but he didn’t,” wrote University of Wisconsin professor Harvey Kaye, who contributes to New Deal 2.0, a project of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.
Jean Edward Smith, a prolific biographer of American political luminaries, including FDR, said Obama lacks Roosevelt’s killer instinct. “FDR recognized that the presidency was an adversarial endeavor,” Smith said in an interview. “Obama and today’s Democrats suffer from a shortage of testosterone.”
The new liberal order, whatever it is, is not a revival of FDR’s politics. As we now know, Obama was no new New Deal.
outlook@washpost.com
Alexander Heffner, a Washington Post intern, has written for the Boston Globe, Newsday and RealClearPolitics.
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