With President Obama recently signing legislation that (essentially) takes the Herbert Hoover approach to economic recovery, it seemed an opportune moment to delve more into every liberals' favorite presidential comparison game: Franklin Roosevelt vs. Barack Obama. When Obama was elected, it seemed within the realm of possibility that the U.S. was about to witness a period comparable to the New Deal. Suffering from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with large Democratic majorities in Congress, and an inspired and activated grassroots, Obama seemed to have all the pieces in place. Today, however, U.S. economic policy remains as trapped as ever within the right-wing paradigms bequeathed to us by Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement.
Why has this happened? Could U.S. progressives have expected more from this president? I will attempt to explore these issues by further interrogating the historical analogy always present in such conversations: that Obama could have been the twenty-first century FDR. In this post, I will note some factors weighing against an Obama presidency being as transformational on progressive economic grounds as Roosevelt's was. In subsequent posts I will delve into details of specific political actions and strategies differentiating the two and try to make some judgments as to what progressives could have reasonably expected from Obama, matched against how Roosevelt tackled similar challenges.
1. Worst Economic State, Fewer Filibusters
First, it is crucial to understand just how devastating the Great Depression was, even in comparison to the current Great Recession. The Great Depression saw national unemployment levels soaring to 25%, while the Great Recession has peaked (so far) at around 10%. By the time Roosevelt came to power, the nation was desperate for solutions that would turn the ship of state away from sinking further into disaster.
Along with majorities often larger than Obama's, Roosevelt also faced a Congress where the filibuster was a rarity (and most invoked on issues threatening white supremacy in the South). Take the Glass-Steagall Act, one of the cornerstones of 1930s financial regulation (and whose dismantling in the late 1990s became emblematic of our new Gilded Age). Glass-Steagall passed the Senate in 1934 without one vote cast against! Victories such as this proved much more plausible while the filibuster lay as a mostly dormant instrument. Obama’s first two years would certainly have witnessed more progressive legislation without the stunning growth in historical terms of the filibuster’s use by Republicans and conservative Democrats. Examining bills passed by the House of Representatives from early 2009 to late 2010 (health care with a public option, cap and trade) one can get a glimpse of the more progressive legacy the presidency could have left (and this ignores legislation such as EFCA which would have had a better chance in a filibuster-less world).
2. A Weak Business Lobby
As incomprehensible as progressives may find this, the business community's ability to influence policy became much diminished in the 1930s. In a rare incident in which the elite classes found themselves strongly divided, business leaders divided between those who wanted to accommodate (or even profit) from the New Deal order and those who hoped to combat and reverse it. Conservative business interests that wished to actively fight the New Deal found themselves a fairly marginalized part of the U.S. political dialogue.
Certainly opposition existed. A number of the most prominent businessmen in the country, including the du Ponts and CEOs at General Motors looked with shock at the reforms of the New Deal. By 1934 they began to organize, creating the American Liberty League. However, it was a mark of the changed times that the New York Times could declare that "nowhere in the country has the lack of any organization of conservative interests been more acutely felt than in the financial community." Despite representing monied interests, the Liberty League proved unable to exert much influence in a nation where, as historian Kim Phillips-Fein notes, "the contrast between the lives of its [the Liberty League's] members and those of the working population of the United States had simply grown too vast." This relative lack of corporate organization and politicization would persist until the early 1970s when a swell of organizing took place that led to everything from the founding of right-wing think tanks to the emergence of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a mainstay of right-wing free market organizing.
Thus, Obama faces a much different political atmsophere. Business did not take nearly as hard a hit, either financially or in its reputation, as it did after the Depression. Furthermore, corporations already have a well-established political infrastructure and a commitment to using it that did not exist to near the same extent.
3. Timing
When Franklin Roosevelt started his presidency, the U.S. was entering its third year of Depression. Although Herbert Hoover’s response to the Depression included government stimulus efforts (such as road construction), his attempts to explain the crisis and offer solutions always maintained a strong conservative strain. For example, in a 1931 speech, Hoover described government programs to help the unemployed, while cautioning that, “We must avoid burdens upon the government which will create more unemployment in private industry than can be gained by further expansion of employment by the Federal Government. We can now stimulate employment and agriculture more effectually and speedily through the voluntary measures in progress.”
By 1932 Americans were ready for something sharply different and Roosevelt offered that, both rhetorically and pro grammatically. While his 1932 campaign sounded some conservative themes, Roosevelt also stressed that he would govern to serve “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” and his promises of “bold, persistent experimentation” rang the loudest. Roosevelt also served as a sort of “professor-in-chief” during his campaigns and presidency, telling a clear story of who caused the Depression and who was going to solve it. Americans were as open as they ever have been to such messages as this from his 1932 nomination speech:
“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.
But it is not and never will be the theory of the Democratic Party.”
Conversely, Obama’s came into office mere months after the onset of the Great Recession. In attempting to comprehend what was happening, the American public found themselves bombarded by a jumble of messages as to the causes and solutions. While the greed of Wall Street seemed a clear culprit, the bipartisan nature of the bank bailouts (whatever one thinks of them as policy), confused the ability of many voters to ascertain who was at fault. Furthermore, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “Stimulus”) came not long after and, in many Americans’ minds, the bailouts and stimulus morphed into one nebulous massive government expenditure. Thus, the stimulus, both as policy and as a metaphor for a progressive solution to the crisis became confused with a pragmatic government move that saved the financial class from their own disaster. As the nation's economy sputtered, this jumble allowed the right-wing, through the vehicle of the Tea Party, to introduce a powerful counter-narrative of why the nation remained (and remains) in the doldrums.
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