New Deal lessons for Obama from popular historian Michael Hiltzik

As the current crop of Republican presidential candidates tours the United States denouncing Big Government in language virulent enough to make Barry Goldwater quail, it seems almost impossible to recall that once upon a time American voters endorsed the principle of strong government action by propelling Franklin D. Roosevelt to landslide victory after landslide victory. The contrast is heightened further when one considers how difficult it has been for the current president, who, like Roosevelt, came into office during a time of great economic crisis and on the heels of a thoroughly discredited Republican Party, to move his own agenda through Congress.

FDR's New Deal remains the standard by which all Democratic presidents are judged. The government put millions of Americans directly to work building roads and bridges and schools that still exist today. The creation of Social Security established the underpinnings of a safety net for all Americans. Wall Street's tendency to excess and destructive speculation was reined in by the Securities Exchange Act and the banking system stabilized for generations by federal deposit insurance.

Meanwhile, Obama struggles merely to get unemployment insurance extended. Should we blame his failings as a politician, or Republicans for their obstruction, or is America simply a different country now than it was 80 years ago? The economy is still in crisis, but the efficacy of government action has been so clamorously called into question by the Tea Party and congressional Republicans -- with Texas Gov. Rick Perry even claiming that the New Deal was a failure and Roosevelt made the Great Depression worse -- that the notion of a new New Deal seems further away than ever.

Michael Hiltzik, a Los Angeles Times columnist and the author of several works of popular history, gets credit for hitting the timing jackpot. Just as President Obama is once again attempting to make the case for government action, Hiltzik's latest book, "The New Deal: A Modern History," is arriving in bookstores. Hiltzik spoke with Salon to explain why we should reexamine FDR's legislative achievements, and what Obama could learn from them.

The New Deal isn't exactly what one would call an underappreciated period of history. What made you decide to revisit it?

I think we have a very distorted and incomplete view today of the New Deal. The last spate of books about it were either overly polemical and ideological, like Amity Shlaes' "The Forgotten Man," or they were incomplete, like Jonathan Alter's recent book "The Hundred Days." So I thought it was time to go back and rediscover it and recapture what really happened, so that we could reset the debate that we were inevitably going to have now about the New Deal, by showing what gave rise to it, what was good about it and what was bad about it.