Word: obamas
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Already a historic figure on account of his race, Obama would emulate FDR by raising first a nation's spirits and then its economic indexes. By restoring the tarnished luster of democratic capitalism, the new President would restore to government a credibility undermined by decades of official mendacity and incompetence. Long-term solutions would supplant the politics of avoidance...
...care reform currently hanging by a thread and panic spreading through the Democratic ranks, it feels less like 1933 than 1993 - when another charismatic, inexperienced President prematurely tested the ice of post-Reagan liberalism, only to find it wouldn't support his activist agenda. Like Bill Clinton before him, Obama has been criticized for misreading his mandate, spending his political capital on health care reform at a time when millions fear for their jobs. It was as if FDR had devoted his first Hundred Days to promoting Social Security instead of a smorgasbord of emergency relief and recovery measures...
That is not the only difference between then and now. As President-elect, Obama extended to the outgoing Bush Administration a statesmanlike cooperation that was the exact opposite of Roosevelt's politically shrewd distancing of himself from his discredited predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Obama could have scored cheap political points by leaving such criminally mismanaged enterprises as AIG and GM to their fate. Of course, he might also have touched off an economic smashup. In pursuing what he believed to be the responsible course, Obama echoed George W. Bush's fourth-quarter abandonment of free-market gospel. For both men, survival...
...most cerebral President since Woodrow Wilson, Obama has more in common with Atticus Finch than with Arianna Huffington. A persuader by instinct, he is trapped inside a political culture that has lost any instinct for persuasion. That he is the third consecutive President to polarize the electorate - the fourth in five if one looks beyond the posthumous regard accorded Ronald Reagan - reveals more about us than about him. It is no accident that the past three decades have seen the rise of sound-bite politics, of snarky bloggers and strident talk radio, not to mention cable "news" largely preoccupied with...
...surprise was that no political price was exacted for such a stand: abandoning assembly-line workers whose requested lifeline was a fraction of what Congress forked over to the financial joyriders who touched off the crisis. Lost in the euphoria surrounding Obama's victory, here was a change of the seismic variety, though admittedly far removed from the new President's vision. Indeed, it suggested that a tipping point had been reached, foreshadowing the fierce resistance to health care reform in a nation where most people were already insured, and most of those seemed content with the status...