By Dana Milbank
Thursday, March 13, 2008

"Let us unite in banishing fear."

-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, March 12, 1933

"We have an energy crisis, to say the least, and we're just doing more of the same."

-- Harry M. Reid, Fireside Podcast, March 12, 2008

Harry Reid was having a good time.

"Come on, Rodell, let 'em have another," the Senate majority leader pleaded with an aide who was trying to cut off questions and shoo reporters from Reid's office yesterday.

The Nevada Democrat's pleasure was understandable: It's not every day that you get to be an icon of American history.

It was the 75th anniversary of President Roosevelt's first Fireside Chat in 1933, delivered in the depths of the Great Depression. But with FDR long gone and a Republican in the White House, there was no obvious way to commemorate the occasion. So Reid and his aides hatched a plan: They lighted a split-wood fire in the green-marble fireplace in his office, pulled a leather armchair in front of it and invited reporters in for a "Fireside Podcast" delivered by Harry Delano Roosevelt. Or was it Franklin Delano Reid?

The majority leader had set a high bar for himself. The economy may be shaky, but it's not yet the Great Depression. And Reid may be one of the smartest legislators in the Capitol, but he's not yet FDR. The result was a Fireside Chat for 2008: Where Roosevelt tried to calm a nation in desperate times, Reid sought to stir up a nation in sluggish times. Where Roosevelt celebrated national unity, Reid complained about Republican intransigence.

"I want to tell our citizens in every part of the nation that the national Congress -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- showed . . . a devotion to public welfare and a realization of the emergency and the necessity for speed that it is difficult to match in our history," Roosevelt said in '33.

"Because of the Republicans led by President Bush wanting to maintain the status quo, we're not moving into areas in which we should be moving," Reid said yesterday. "They've filibustered our attempt to do something about the housing industry."

Roosevelt, reopening banks after a wave of failures shut them down for a week, declared: "The phantom of fear will soon be laid . . . I can assure you that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress."

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."