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A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions
Reed Hundt
Rosetta Books, $27.50 (cloth)
In November 2008, as a financial mudslide that had slowly been
accelerating for months accumulated increasingly persuasive comparisons
to the collapse that triggered the Great Depression in 1929, Time
magazine ran a cover showing Barack Obama’s smiling face inserted in
place of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s. The soon-to-be forty-fourth
president sits in the thirty-second’s open-topped car, wearing
Roosevelt’s lucky campaign hat, his grin gripping Roosevelt’s trademark
long cigarette-holder. The image suggested Obama, the president-elect
who promised hope and change, could follow in his Democratic
predecessor’s footsteps. Roosevelt met economic crisis with massive
public works programs that gave the dignity of employment to millions of
Americans, and—more importantly in that era of rising fascism—helped
restore their faith in the U.S. government’s ability to meet their needs.
For the better part of a half century, the Democratic Party has been in
a multigenerational crisis over its past.
Time’s article about Obama-as-Roosevelt came a week after a New Yorker
feature that sported a similar illustration but took a more tempered
view. There, journalist George Packer quoted Cass Sunstein, Obama’s
onetime academic colleague and sometime political advisor, describing
the newly elected president as post-partisan and a “visionary
minimalist”—a man little devoted to great change. This attitude, Packer
noted, made Obama “distinctly un-Rooseveltian.” Before long, Packer’s
more cautious view was vindicated. By 2009, when the historian William
E. Leuchtenburg put out a new edition of his book on the post-1945
presidency, In the Shadow of FDR (1983), adding a chapter on Obama’s
first hundred days, Leuchtenburg could already note how frequently
“Obama expressed a degree of separation from the age of Roosevelt.” He
even quoted the new president as saying, “My interest is finding
something that works. . . . whether it’s coming from FDR or it’s coming
from Ronald Reagan.”
full: http://bostonreview.net/politics/eric-rauchway-obamas-original-sin
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