Andrei Cherny: FDR’s Lessons for Obama
Andrei Cherny is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the president of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He is the author of a forthcoming history of Franklin Roosevelt and his battle with big-business enemies of the New Deal.
It has become a universally acknowledged truth in coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign, one repeated with increased fervor with each dismal jobs report, that no president has won reelection with an unemployment rate above 7.2 percent. But always there is the caveat: . . . since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.
In the aftermath of Thursday night’s presidential address on jobs, that caveat should be more than an afterthought. FDR’s victory three-quarters of a century ago has important parallels to the situation in which President Obama finds himself and provides vital lessons if he is to be similarly successful.
While Roosevelt had been elected in 1932 during a period of economic collapse, four years later the economy was still struggling. Unemployment in 1936 was 16.6 percent. The moment of national unity that marked Roosevelt’s first hundred days had petered out, leaving behind a general dissatisfaction with large-scale, inefficient government bureaucracies and their stratospheric levels of federal spending and debt. Newspapers had coined the term “boondoggle” to describe the high-end dog shelters, city zoo monkey houses, safety pin studies and other New Deal projects that attempted to stimulate the economy. New entitlement programs such as Social Security had been passed, over strong opposition, but had yet to take effect.
While Obama might confront the propaganda machine of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, Roosevelt faced off against a relatively more powerful William Randolph Hearst and his newspaper empire....