Will Obama Ever Figure Out That Americans Want Him To Be More Like FDR And Less Like George W Bush?

I'm hearing from more and more candidates lately who are telling me that they want to make sure voters know that, unlike Barack Obama, they're from the New Deal, progressive end of the Democratic Party. People thought Nick Ruiz, the central Florida candidate-- an ex-Green running as a Democrat against deranged teabagger Sandy Adams-- was radical when he was one of the first to take this tack. Now even more establishment Democrats are making it clear that they may wish Obama well and they may think he's a better choice than Romney or Perry but his corporatist policies are not what's behind their own campaigns. And yesterday I heard something similar from an unlikely source, the chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, Andrei Cherny!

Cherny a former White House speech writer, author of The Next Deal: The Future of Public Life in the Information Age and a former Arizona Assistant Attorney General, sent me an OpEd he wrote for the Washington Post last week, FDR's Lessons For Obama. It's a lesson Obama apparently doesn't want to hear-- and that the corporatist hacks around him are warning him against-- but it's a message of hope.

It has become a universally acknowledged truth in coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign, one repeated with increased fervor with each dismal jobs report, that no president has won reelection with an unemployment rate above 7.2 percent. But always there is the caveat: .?.?. since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.

In the aftermath of Thursday night’s presidential address on jobs, that caveat should be more than an afterthought. FDR’s victory three-quarters of a century ago has important parallels to the situation in which President Obama finds himself and provides vital lessons if he is to be similarly successful.

While Roosevelt had been elected in 1932 during a period of economic collapse, four years later the economy was still struggling. Unemployment in 1936 was 16.6 percent. The moment of national unity that marked Roosevelt’s first hundred days had petered out, leaving behind a general dissatisfaction with large-scale, inefficient government bureaucracies and their stratospheric levels of federal spending and debt. Newspapers had coined the term “boondoggle” to describe the high-end dog shelters, city zoo monkey houses, safety pin studies and other New Deal projects that attempted to stimulate the economy. New entitlement programs such as Social Security had been passed, over strong opposition, but had yet to take effect.

While Obama might confront the propaganda machine of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, Roosevelt faced off against a relatively more powerful William Randolph Hearst and his newspaper empire. In 1936 two-thirds of Americans read newspapers, which were vociferously anti-New Deal. Today, the Tea Party and a network of organizations funded by the Koch family and others focus their attacks on Obama. In 1936, charges of creeping socialism and the savaging of the Constitution were launched by the Liberty League and its affiliated groups, funded by a flood of money from the du Pont family and major corporations.

And yet when Election Day arrived, Roosevelt won by a landslide of historic proportions.

The differences between Roosevelt’s era and Obama’s are too numerous to list. Nevertheless, Obama and his advisers have much to learn from Roosevelt’s triumph.

First, Roosevelt constantly underscored the contrast between his plan and his opponents’ fealty to the policies and ideas that, in the decade before his election, had led directly to the Great Depression.

Second, Roosevelt made clear to the American people where the battle lines had been drawn. After the first two years of his administration, in which he attempted to work in concert with the business community, Roosevelt shifted gears in the summer of 1935. He sought to pick a fight with the richest men in the country, moving to significantly raise their taxes in the Revenue Act of 1935. In terms of government operations, the legislation was ultimately insignificant — it produced an additional $250 million in federal accounts, the equivalent then of running the government for 10 days. But revenue was not the goal. “This is a hell raiser, not a revenue raiser,” as one congressman put it. Harper’s Magazine wrote in June 1936 that the tax hike caused “more resentment against the President than any other act of his administration.” Roosevelt did not shy away from that resentment from the wealthy elite. Indeed, when he asserted “I welcome their hatred” in the climactic speech of his 1936 campaign, it was because it worked to his political benefit. [See video above.]

Most important, in that summer of ’35, Roosevelt had the courage to rebuild his presidency almost from scratch. When the set of national planning programs that made up the first New Deal-- in particular, the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration-- proved ineffective and ultimately were ruled unconstitutional, Roosevelt changed course. His second New Deal instead emphasized putting Americans to work in the Works Progress Administration, building up the strength of unions and expanding the safety net with Social Security.

The policies of 1935 do not necessarily fit the America of 2011, but there are instructive political and policy lessons in the crinkling newspapers and crackling radio broadcasts of that era. The choice Obama confronts is not the one repeated ad nauseam by pundits in recent weeks: “Go big” and double down on stimulus policies to make a political point, or “go small” and seek to pass tiny, ineffective tinkers. Rather, it is one that Roosevelt faced in a similar moment: Offer new ideas or more of the same. As Obama moves from Thursday’s speech to laying out an agenda for a second term, it is that decision that will define the rest of his presidency.

Cherny's new book is a history of Roosevelt's battle with the deadly Big Business enemies of the New Deal. And this year those self-same Big Business enemies of working families and of American democracy itself, have an ugly cast of characters vying for a chance to take on the weak, conflicted, corporate-leaning Obama whose hope always seemed to be to come across as not as bad as the extremist Republicans. It didn't help last November when rank-and-file Democrats sat on their hands while Obama's House majority evaporated and it doesn't seem to be working in the special elections in NV-2 or NY-9 today. Is Rick Perry a monster? Sure. But a surprising number of progressives are willing to play chicken and tell Obama they will not come to his aid if he doesn't act-- not just talk, but act-- like a New Deal Democrat. As Robert Reich pointed out at the link directly above, voters don't always vote for the best financial interests.

Of all the nonsense Texas Gov. Rick Perry spews about states' rights and the 10th Amendment, his dumbest is the notion that states should go it alone. "We've got a great Union," he said at a Tea Party rally in Austin in April 2009. "There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that."

The core of his message isn't outright secession, though. It's that the locus of governmental action ought to be at the state rather than the federal level. "It is essential to our liberty," he writes in his book, "Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington," "that we be allowed to live as we see fit through the democratic process at the local and state level."

Perry doesn't like the Federal Reserve Board. He hates the Internal Revenue Service even more. He's even against federal income taxes. If he had his way, taxpayers would pay states rather than the federal government for all the services and transfer payments they get.

This might be a good deal for Texas. According to the most recent data from the Tax Foundation, the citizens of Texas receive only 94 cents from the federal government for every tax dollar they send to Washington.

But it would be a bad deal for most other so-called red states. On average, citizens of states with strong Republican majorities get back more from the federal government than they pay in.

Kentucky receives $1.51 from Washington for every dollar its citizens pay in federal taxes. Alabama gets back $1.66. Louisiana receives $1.78. Alaska, $1.84. Mississippi, $2.02. Arizona, $1.19. Idaho, $1.21. South Carolina, $1.35. Oklahoma, $1.36. Arkansas, $1.41. Montana, $1.47. Nebraska, $1.10. Wyoming, $1.11. Kansas, $1.12.

On the other hand, fiscal secession would be a boon to most blue states, those with strong Democratic majorities. The citizens of California-- hit harder by the recession than most-- receive from Washington only 78 cents for every tax dollar they send to Washington. New Yorkers get back only 79 cents on every tax dollar they send in. Massachusetts, 82 cents. Oregon, 98 cents.

In other words, blue states are subsidizing red states. The federal government is like a giant sump pump-- pulling dollars out of liberal enclaves like California, New York, Massachusetts and Oregon and sending them to conservative places like Montana, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arizona, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska and the Old South.

As a practical matter, then, Rick Perry's fight to save America from Washington would actually save blue states from red states. So is Perry a closet liberal?

Hardly. Perry's approach would also pit each state against another. That's already happening when it comes to competition for jobs. As a result, state money that might otherwise be spent on schools or infrastructure has been funneled to corporations.

As governor, Perry has so far doled out $440 million of Texas' tax dollars to companies that relocate to the state. His office says the cash subsidies have attracted almost 59,000 jobs so far.

This may be good for Texas but not for the states that lose the jobs lured there. Such handouts just rob Peter to pay Paul. Corporations are enriched by the state tax dollars that bribe them to relocate, but America as a whole doesn't gain new jobs. It's just a giant zero-sum game.

Worse yet, the tax dollars used in these kinds of bidding wars can turn into political slush funds for governors. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Dallas Morning News reported in October that more than $16 million of Perry's handouts had gone to companies with substantial links to some of his biggest campaign backers.

How responsibilities should be divided up among different levels of government is an important question. America has been struggling with it since our founding.

But one of the main reasons we rely on the federal government-- and don't pay attention to how much the citizens of our own state get back for every tax dollar we send to Washington - is the idea that we're all in this together. E Pluribus Unum.

Making states rather than the federal government the locus of public action would pull us apart. The only beneficiaries of such zero-sum games would be the biggest companies that can play one state off against the other.

Put more directly, House Republicans don't want to pass President Obama's new jobs proposal because they're "worried about giving Obama any victories-- even on issues the GOP has supported in the past."

And despite public declarations about finding common ground with Obama, some Republicans are privately grumbling that their leaders are being too accommodating with the president.

“Obama is on the ropes; why do we appear ready to hand him a win?” said one senior House Republican aide who requested anonymity to discuss the matter freely. “I just don’t want to co-own the economy by having to tout that we passed a jobs bill that won’t work or at least won’t do enough.”

Even with the presence of so many GOP-friendly provisions in Obama’s plan-- like trade agreements and small-business tax relief-- some senior lawmakers are pulling back...