Posted on 02/28/2010 5:00:12 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
President Obama spent seven hours last week acting like a committee chairman, not a president. Rather than preside over the nationally televised health care “summit” of Democratic and Republican members of Congress, Obama was a participant. He big-footed Democrats and responded to Republican statements himself. He talked and talked and talked, considerably more than anyone else and for a total of two hours. When Obama delivered a concluding monologue, the TV cameras panned to a drowsy and bored group of senators and House members, the Republicans especially.
Did Obama lower the presidency to the level of mere legislator? Perhaps. But I think Obama’s behavior at the summit answers a separate question, one that’s lingered since he was elected more than 15 months ago. Is Obama the new FDR? The answer is no.
If Franklin Delano Roosevelt were president today, the summit never would have happened. As the top priority on his agenda, liberal health care reform would have been enacted already. For Obama, the summit was a last-gasp attempt to revive his moribund legislation. More than likely, it will fail.
The reason is tied to what is probably the greatest difference between FDR and Obama. Roosevelt took command of Washington. Obama hasn’t. “FDR became the father of the modern presidency by moving the Chief Executive to the center of the American political universe,” John Yoo writes in his new book on presidential power, Crisis and Command. “Roosevelt’s revolution radically shifted the balance of power among the three branches of government.”
Obama has weakened the presidency and strengthened the power of Congress—a shift in the other direction. FDR seized legislative authority. The bills that Congress passed in his first 100 days and beyond were produced by the Roosevelt administration and ratified reflexively by Congress. There’s a reason you probably don’t know who Henry Rainey and Joe Robinson were. They were rubber stamps, Rainey as House speaker, Robinson as Senate majority leader.
But in Obama’s Washington, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid are powerhouses. The job of actually writing bills—the economic stimulus, health care, cap and trade, the omnibus appropriation—was turned over to them and their colleagues. To put it more bluntly, Obama has abdicated where FDR ruled like a king (at least in his first year in the White House).
Roosevelt’s strategy worked. Obama’s hasn’t. The FDR agenda passed, though the Supreme Court later struck down important parts of it. Except for the stimulus, Obama’s top priorities haven’t passed. FDR moved on, in 1935 and 1936, to getting the so-called Second New Deal (Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act) enacted. Obama’s future looks less rosy.
It’s clear that Roosevelt had an ambitious vision and a far more expansive idea of the presidency than Obama has. When I first heard the tale that Obama had told congressional Democrats to write the bills and he’d sell them, I thought it was apocryphal. Now I’m not so sure. Obama seems to see presidential power as purely rhetorical.
Two appealing aspects of Roosevelt’s public style have not been duplicated by Obama. He hasn’t come close. “In contrast to presidents who inundate the nation with words, Roosevelt rationed his broadcasts,” writes presidential historian Fred Greenstein in The Presidential Difference. He gave four fireside chats his first year, then fewer. In a letter cited by Greenstein, FDR said “the public psychology cannot be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.”
Obama, in contrast, talks incessantly on practically any subject. He was interviewed at halftime of the recent Duke-Georgetown basketball game on—you guessed it—basketball. He has debased the value of the “exclusive” interview with the president by granting so many. Obama is ubiquitous, and always talking. He’s lost his connection with millions of Americans, who’ve tuned him out. He’s sparked a political backlash. FDR didn’t until his second term.
Then there’s the mystery of FDR the man. “The man behind the style was an enigma,” Greenstein writes. This created a mystique and enhanced his influence. Obama is relatively transparent and has less clout. When he tries to promote a deal in public or intimidate an opponent—he tried both at last week’s summit—he comes across as a bossy senator or chief of staff.
To Obama’s credit, he hasn’t claimed to be the reincarnation of FDR. At a fundraiser last year, he said he’d put his “first four months (in office) up against any prior administration since FDR.” The “since” gets Obama off the hook. The FDR issue has been raised mostly by friendly liberals in the media.
It’s an unfair comparison. Roosevelt’s reputation for imposing a liberal makeover on America is impossible to match. But Obama has tried. And in one significant way he’s been successful. Like FDR, he’s broadened the size and scope of the federal government. Should his health care and cap and trade bills pass, along with the authority to seize any financial institution whose collapse would be “a systemic risk” to the economy, Obama would put himself in FDR’s class as a supersizer of Washington’s power. He’s not there yet.
By following another Roosevelt example, Obama has bought trouble. FDR thought government spending would spur economic recovery. It didn’t. And his surge in regulation and tax increases actually impeded economic growth and job creation.
So, too, with Obama. Same policies, same result. Yet he appears puzzled why there were 4 million fewer jobs in the country after a year of his presidency. Liberal critics such as economist Paul Krugman insist FDR’s stimulus wasn’t large enough and neither is Obama’s. Conservatives believe Obama’s policies are wrong, and what works are across-the-board individual and corporate tax cuts. Either way, Obama comes up short.
For Obama, the most brutal disparity between him and FDR is likely to come in November. After the Democratic landslide of 1932, Democrats won still more seats in Congress in 1934. In this year’s midterm congressional elections, that’s an outcome Obama can only dream about.
BTTT
The Incredible Shrinking President.
The thing that struck me about the “summit’ was that Obama met on a level playing field with mere legislators. Every other President would have brought influential legislators or critical votes into the White House and awed them with the power of the Presidency. Obama truly can’t get past being a community organizer. He debased his office with his little PR exercise.
Liberals are learning a sad lesson, and that is that Obama is woefully inexperienced. Electing a media creation, a neophyte, is coming back to haunt them.
I sometimes wonder if Teddy did this on purpose. He got the Obama ball rolling; he had to know the man was incapable of leading at this point. Perhaps he thought he didn’t want the stronger, experienced Hillary in, and preferred someone that Congress could lead around by the nose.
By electing Obama, we have made Pelosi and Reid the real president.
VERY interesting op-ed piece. Thanks for posting it.
>> Obama, in contrast, talks incessantly on practically any subject... He’s lost his connection with millions of Americans, who’ve tuned him out.
That’s a good, concise analysis of Bambi’s problems. All talk... no effectivity. Which follows from the fact that he’s an empty suit.
BHO is less qualified than Franklin Delano Romanowski.
4 million since Jan ‘09. Fair is fair.
Leaders lead. Ideologues push.
Obama pushes.
He debased his office with his little PR exercise.
Mac Daddy does that each and every day with phony photo-op’s, promoting himself daily and the most vile part being unable to ever tell the truth, ever.
More like to the level of an overpaid community organizer.
Zer0 has reduced the presidency to the level of a common zer0.
good, so he is a tiny 0
There are many differences between FDR and Obama. For one thing, FDR had executive experience as Governor of New York (then the most populous state) before running for President. For another, FDR had a sense of humor (e.g., pretending to be upset over Republican attacks on his little dog Fala), whereas Obama is a humorless prig, maybe worse in that way than Jimmy Carter. FDR came across as likable, whatever he was in private, whereas doesn't even try to be likable--it's as if he feels that it is our duty to like him because he's the first black President.
Jimmy Carter is feeling more and more vindicated every day.
One of the issues that Obama highlights for us is that very, very few men without executive experience (whether as governor or a military officer) make it to the Presidency.
Obama is a prime example of why.
FDR had been the governor of NY State directly before running for the Presidency. NY State at that time was the most populated state in the US, the home of Wall Street, lots of banks, corruption, etc, etc. FDR was seen by the nation as it slipped into the Depression as having had something of a clue what to do as a governor.
Obama, meanwhile, was elected because of two issues:
1. He wasn’t Bush. The press, the coasts and an increasing number of independents, soured on the GOP and Bush especially going into 2008. The GOP’s mistake of letting McCain get to the final round when McCain hasn’t got the economic IQ to know how to support himself other than by marrying money was very apparent as the markets were melting down during the campaign.
2. Obama is black, and there was a huge sales job to “the youth” how were were all going to get along, birds would sing again, the oceans would stop rising, the world would be a better place and the Gaia would smile upon us if only we’d elect a black man.
Well, the first narrative was pretty much true, but sucking less than your opponent has turned out to be a pretty limited qualification. As it turns out, Obama has continued nearly every single policy of the Bush administration, and on some of them, he’s doubled down.
The second narrative was ridiculous on its face from the get-go, but self-loathing white liberals felt really good about themselves at the time, and there’s nothing more important in their universe than feeling really good about themselves. Right up until they lose *their* job, *their* home, etc. Then suddenly, I’m sure they’re saying some pretty nasty things behind closed doors about our historic President.
So, yea, Barry ain’t no FDR. “No duh.” The reason why is that Barry was only a senator, in his first term, and not a particularly impressive senator either. Barry has, in fact, never won a political battle that wasn’t rigged in his favor. He’s never taken a piece of legislation that was contested by the opposition through the legislative process. His overriding vote was “present” - the mark of some guy who is just filling a seat. Barry talks incessantly because that’s exactly what senators do: the US Senate is the biggest collection of professional windbags on the planet. Duh.
And somehow, the feckless idiots in the press are surprised by this outcome?
Maybe no FDR, but Dear Leader is surely a Chavez or a Castro or a Lenin or Pol Pot....got to give him credit for being wannabe despotic dictator who could care less for what the people want....a trait common to all tyrants.
Presumably, the reference is to 4 million jobs lost since his inauguration. The others were lost between his election and his inauguration.
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