There's a short but
perceptive post on Paul Krugman's blog about Obama and right-wing mythology. He begins by noting many Democrats' surprise during the campaign when Obama praised Reagan. Then he calls attention
to this, by Thomas Ferguson at New Deal 2.0.
It starts here, from the
transcript of Barack Obama at his recent meeting with
five progressive bloggers (my emphasis):
This notion that somehow I could have gone and made the case around the country for a far bigger stimulus because of the magnitude of the crisis, well, we understood the magnitude of the crisis. We didn't actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.
Note that Obama is primarily trying to defend his weak-tea stimulus package (a) by simply calling weak tea strong, and (b) by saying Roosevelt let a great many people suffer unnecessarily in order to pass the New Deal.
Your mind goes immediately to the stimulus part of the quote. But look at what he just did to Roosevelt.
Ferguson and Krugman focus on this, well, smear. And smear it is, from a known source.
Ferguson:
Many readers [of the president's remark] responded in shocked disbelief: The President can’t mean what he said. He must have misspoken — he can’t really be claiming that Roosevelt sat on his hands, deliberately letting the Depression get worse and worse.
Perhaps it was just a slip. But in 2010, even slips can be revealing — and this one comes from a definite part of the political spectrum. The President was repeating a canard that goes back to the circle of die hards around President Herbert Hoover as he exited the White House in a cloud of bitterness in 1933. In recent years, as a vast campaign against the memory of the New Deal has gathered steam, such claims have gone mainstream. For example, take the carefully hedged version recently put forward by Amity Shlaes in her study of the New Deal, “The Forgotten Man“: “But Roosevelt was not interested in cooperation. We will never know all his motives, but it was clear that a crisis now could only strengthen his mandate for action come inauguration in March.”
We are unlikely ever to know for sure. But as President Obama took office, the Council on Foreign Relations was cranking up a remarkably one-sided conference purporting to be a “Second Look at the Great Depression and the New Deal.” Ms. Shlaes was a prominent participant, as was the Council’s co-chair, one Robert Rubin, whose myriad protégés thronged the Obama Treasury and economic councils.
That's the
conservative Amity Shlaes, known
spreader of New Deal fable — click the link to read her assert, many times, that the New Deal lengthened the Depression.
Here's Krugman's condensed version of what really happened in the long gap between Roosevelt's election and his taking office:
As Ferguson explains, this is a right-wing smear. What actually happened was that during the interregnum between the 1932 election and the 1933 inauguration — which was much longer then, because the inauguration didn’t take place until March — Herbert Hoover tried to rope FDR into maintaining his policies, including rigid adherence to the gold standard and fiscal austerity. FDR declined to be part of this.
Do
read Ferguson for the full version; it's not long and rather enlightening.
Obama is wrong, but he passed on the smear anyway. And he will be quoted (by the right) as saying it for at least a generation — Roosevelt cold-shouldered Hoover's overtures to make the Depression deepen and the New Deal easier to pass. Thank you, Mr. President. That water must get heavy.
Does it matter why Obama said this, or simply that he does this stuff a lot? Krugman's take-away:
[I]t’s becoming clear that progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion. Once you got past the soaring rhetoric you noticed, if you actually paid attention to what he said, that he largely accepted the conservative storyline, a view of the world, including a mythological history, that bears little resemblance to the facts.
I'll simply close with this. In case you haven't, this would be a good time to read Ken Silverstein's excellent and prescient
2006 Harpers profile, "
Barack Obama, Inc.: The birth of a Washington machine". Best to be well informed as tough decisions loom.
GP
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