“but when people are starving, they will vote for the devil himself if he promises them food”
There it is right there: “promises”. My point was that he did not deliver, but I guess the voters were more than happy to eat his promises for supper every night.
FDR may have given some people some food, but he didn’t deliver on returning the economy as a whole back to a place where everyone could feed themselves. Ultimately, the difference between how history views Hoover and Roosevelt is that it takes FDR at his word and rewards his good intentions, whereas, for whatever reason, it mistrusts everything Hoover ever said. PR is king!
Old Frank did deliver—to Democrat party apparatchiks who then dispensed the jobs and largesse. It was particularly obvious in my town, as two brothers lorded it over the townspeople because they were lower level party functionaries.
To this day, party Democrats remember that as being “good times”, and long for the day when they had power over others, like so may zampolit, or political officers. For the first time in their lives, somebody had to bow and scrape before them, or do without.
And there was a continual media drumbeat that the Democrats provided food, jobs and housing, and the Republicans had taken them away. Importantly, the end result was the conversion of many of the people to “permanent Democrats”, who stayed with the party for decades.
Ronald Reagan, who self-identified as a New Deal Democrat, was ironically the person who finally ended their iron grip on power.
So it is vital that conservatives and Republicans remember those painful lessons. If Obama and company go up in a sheet of flame in two years, with a Republican sweep of congress, their first inclination will be to solve the problem.
And this might be a bad mistake, because Obama will take the credit for it. In Hoover’s last term, he had a Democrat congress that refused most of his economic reforms. They *wanted* a depression, because they wanted power.
Like it or not, the Republicans might have to return the favor, and let the Democrats be the minority party for 50 years. As Pelosi just demonstrated, the Newt Gingrich reforms only mattered when Democrats profited from them. Now that Democrats are in charge, they feel perfectly fine with double crossing the Republicans, and taking all power for themselves.
America was dumb enough to elect Democrat everything. So if in two years Republicans win back congress, it has to be two more years of letting Americans blame the Democrats, and then the next president, a Republican, gets credit for getting America back on its feet again.
And the Democrats get nothing, except to be despised for half a century.