It's obvious that Obama's camp has done their historical reasearch and have been emulating Franklin D. Roosevelt's government expansion and handouts operations during their time in office. Democrats love to liken FDR to Thomas Edison as a great experimenter, but his "experiments" did not help the sagging economy of his era because they were based on flawed Keynesian economic theories.
By emulating Roosevelt's governing philosophy, the Obama people are fantasizing that they will also emulate Roosevelt's smashing political success in gaining re-election. But they fail to realize that the Democrats of the New Deal era could always run against the ghost of the inept Hoover Administration. But trying to make George W. Bush into today's version of Hoover just won't work anywhere near as well.
Yes. He was inept in stopping the Democrat agenda and fighting a war at the same time, and that caused that agenda to go forward until the economy imploded. But that’s hardly the argument you would make for more of the same quack medicine after four years of it with nothing to speak of.