The comparison of then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the height of the Presidential campaign was hyped, overblown and made mostly to sell magazines and puff up TV pundit sound bites, by a few Democratic party campaign boosters carried away with themselves.
Though undoubtedly flattered by it, candidate Obama did not encourage the comparison to FDR.
This writer, along with countless others the first months after inauguration, did more than just hope that President Obama would inch toward looking and acting like FDR. We relentlessly pushed, prodded and hectored him to lurch in that direction. There were many days of bitter frustration and disappointment, punctuated by loud grumbling of betrayal.
Obama, as FDR, knew that he was in a political life-and-death, take-no-prisoners war with his political enemies — the GOP, ultra-conservative Democrats, Wall Street, the big bankers and big manufacturers. But unlike FDR, for months he soft peddled, coddled, and placated his opponents even as they made absolutely no effort to mask their loathing of his policies and presidency, and made it abundantly clear they would stop at nothing to hound him from office.
FDR, by contrast, hit back hard at his enemies as obstructionists and economic royalists. He never wavered from his commitment that the workers and farmers, the “common man,” came first.
Lesson Strongly Learned
Now President Obama has done the same. His in-the-trenches fightback started when he admitted what everyone knew, that making nice with the GOP and making futile appeals to them for bi-partisanship sounds good in White House interviews and Congressional speeches but in the ruthless party-eat-party world of realpolitik, it’s a surefire prescription for an ineffectual, moribund and hapless pPesidency, not to mention ridicule as a President sans spine.
In quick succession he’s rammed through a drastically retooled, consumer-friendly health care reform law.
It looks nothing like the pharmaceutical and private health insurer goody-laden bill of six months ago, along with the added FDR touch of beating back the furious lobbying by banks and private lenders to keep their profit-first fingers in student lending, and making the government the lender of first resort for student loans.
He added millions to back it up, with a special nod toward expanding aid to strapped historically black colleges.
There also was a tweak of the financial reform package that takes a strong first step toward reining in the orgy of Wall Street freeboot speculation, trading, swaps, and scams of investors, borrowers and the government that nearly wrecked the economy.
Jobs Bills Are Wheezing
The much needed independent consumer agency with full power to oversee and regulate lending practices in the financial reform bill didn’t happen. The new agency will not be under the direct grip of the Fed, which would kill any regulation that was perceived as Wall Street and Big Bank unfriendly. Obama has also endorsed enactment of a modified version of the Glass-Steagall act. That’s the tough FDR era bank regulation act.
The watered down and grossly underfunded Senate jobs bill won’t do much to dent the near double-digit unemployment. But Obama has strongly signaled that he’ll plough stimulus dollars directly into government run job training programs, job banks, and public works projects.
The other FDR touch is to virtually order the banks to lend more to distressed homeowners, cut borrowing rates and terms, and promise more aggressive government intervention to aid strapped, endangered homeowners. These are the programs that will do much to help the working class, and the minority poor.
It makes the screech that he push a black agenda seem even more silly, ridiculous and self-serving.
Obama ignored the squeals of the GOP obstructionists with appointments to judgeships. And a slew of recess appointments of top-flight sensitive, moderate, first-class scholars and professionals to diplomatic, commerce, and labor regulatory board posts. He drew the ire of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by holding firm on his demand to halt renewed Israeli settler expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. On a personal and humane note, Obama’s magnificent gesture of donating every penny of his $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize award to solid charities and community help organizations and causes.
The Big Bank and Wall Street greed merchants could learn a lesson from this example. Fat chance of that.
FDR did not substitute rock-star, photo-op, stagey, high-profile media posturing for tough leadership.
When the GOP and the press wrote the epitaph for him midway through his second term in 1938, he continued to swing away. FDR took to the airwaves and hit the road to blast the economic royalists and the obstructionist judges and those in Congress to his reform program.
In the final stages of the healthcare reform fight and its immediate aftermath, Obama snatched a page directly from FDR and mobilized millions of Americans to fight for real reform. As long as he continues to do that, he’ll continue to look and act like FDR.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a nationally acclaimed author and political analyst. He has authored 10 books. His articles are published in newspapers and magazines nationally in the United States. Three of his books have been published in other languages. He also is a social and political analyst, and he appears on such television programs as CNN, MSBC, NPR, the O'Reilly Show, American Urban Radio Network, and local Los Angeles television and radio stations as well. He is an associate editor at New America Media and a regular contributor to BlackNews.com, Alternet.com, BlackAmericaWeb.com and the HuffingtonPost.com. He does a weekly commentary on KJLH radio in Los Angeles. His weekly radio show, The Hutchinson Report, also can be heard in Los Angeles on KTYM-AM, 1460, and nationally on blogtalkradio.com
His newest book is, “How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge” (Middle Passage Press).
