HMR, Fanning the Flames

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Washington Sketch: Another Fireside Chat

On Wednesday, Harry Reid held a fireside chat in his office in honor of the President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first fireside chat 75 years ago.

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The phantom reappeared yesterday. "Today we have many of the same things wrong with us that was wrong with the country when Roosevelt made his first Fireside Chat," Reid said at the start of his Fireside Podcast. "This country we find ourselves in is a country just like when Franklin Roosevelt gave that chat 75 years ago," he repeated.

The only thing we have to fear is . . . well, lots of things, actually.

Reporters attending the chat assembled outside Reid's Capitol office, where an oil portrait of FDR hung on a wall. When they entered the lawmaker's office, they found him sitting in an armchair, notecards in lap, in front of a crackling fire. "It seems we all have become familiar with Roosevelt's Fireside Chats, even though there are not many people still around who watched the Fireside Chats," Reid began.

Actually, Roosevelt didn't have a fire burning in the room (the listeners were the ones supposed to be sitting around the fire). But this was a technicality; Reid got points for enthusiasm.

"The housing market is still in very, very difficult shape," he informed whoever might listen to his podcast while sitting near the hearth. "We need to do something to help the struggling housing crisis, and we've got no help from the Republicans to do that."

His policy prescriptions were a bit more workaday than the broad strokes of the New Deal that Roosevelt unveiled in another of his chats. "We've got to get middle-class Americans tax cuts; we've got to give people the ability to be educated no matter how much money their parents have -- and that's the message 75 years after Franklin Roosevelt," the majority leader announced.

Reid then added a new twist to the old chat by taking questions. On the budget: "The Founding Fathers would be cringing to hear people talking about eliminating earmarks." On Bush's recess appointments: "We'll be in pro forma session to stop the president from doing some of the mischievous acts." On the nitty-gritty of legislation: "We're going to do an extension of unemployment benefits; we're going to do summer jobs; we're going to do LIHEAP" -- the home heating program for poor people.

Somebody asked Reid about what Fireside Chat research he did before reviving the custom. "I even went further than that and read his second inaugural address," the senator said. That was the one when FDR said, "I see one-third of a nation ill housed, ill clad and ill nourished."

Reid didn't go quite that far. But he did see a nation pinched at the pump. "It's predicted today that by early summer, the average price of a gallon of gas across our country will be more than $4 a gallon -- that's really something," he chatted. "The price of oil yesterday was around $110 a barrel. We were really frantic not long ago when we knew the price of a barrel of oil was going to be $50."

Frantic? Seventy-five years ago yesterday, Roosevelt proposed a remedy for that. "More important than currency, more important than gold," he said, "is the confidence of the people."