Leadership and Interventionism Are Not the Same Thing

Robert Kagan has written a piece in the New Republic entitled "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire." In it, he bemoans what he perceives as America's retreat from its responsibility to preserve a liberal world order. Kagan argues: "Many Americans and their political leaders in both parties, including President Obama, have either forgotten or rejected the assumptions that undergirded American foreign policy for the past seven decades."

Kagan is correct that public attitudes towards America's role in the world have shifted recently, but he dramatically overstates the case when he posits a break with a 70-year tradition. He seems to equate "leadership" with military interventionism. Americans have rejected the latter, not the former.

What Kagan does not recognize is that the public's current aversion to military interventionism abroad is not only consistent with America's pre-World War II foreign policy, but with the golden age of leadership he praises.

Kagan's fundamental mistake is to think that the American people embraced military interventionism during and after World War II. They did not.

Americans have always been averse to military actions leading to large numbers of American casualties and extended occupations of hostile territory. In the two years before Pearl Harbor, Americans (even the so-called "interventionists") desperately clung to the idea that they could protect American interests merely by supplying the British (and later the Soviets) with the weapons to do the fighting.

While conventional wisdom suggests that Pearl Harbor changed all that, the reality is different. Even after the United States entered the war, it was reluctant to launch military operations that posed the threat of huge casualties. As David M. Kennedy has stated, this American predilection to avoid combat with Germany's forces in France led Stalin to conclude: "it looks like the Americans have decided to fight this war with American money and American machines and Russian men."

Even the major architect of the postwar order, Franklin Roosevelt, did not envision an America that would permanently station large numbers of U.S. soldiers abroad, much less deploy them on a regular basis. Yes, he did see the United States as the leading power in the new United Nations. But the point of having the so-called "Four Policemen" was to insure that the other three would be the ones to send soldiers to keep order in their respective spheres of interest. He imagined that the American role would be primarily in the form of naval and air power. "The United States will have to lead," FDR said of the UN, but its role would be to use "its good offices always to conciliate to help solve the differences which will arise between the others."

FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Teheran
By Horton (Capt), War Office official photographer
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

As the historian Warren Kimball has written, at the 1943 Teheran conference, when Stalin pressed him on how the United States would comport itself as one of the policemen, "FDR resorted to his prewar notion of sending only planes and ships from the United States to keep the peace in Europe." In FDR's mind, the United States would be primarily responsible for order in the western hemisphere, a role it had played for decades.

Even the so-called American declaration of cold war, the Truman Doctrine speech of March 1947, avoided the implication that American military forces would be deployed to uphold the doctrine. The speech simultaneously signaled to the world that the United States was both assuming some of Britain's responsibilities and had given up on the idea of cooperation with the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, Truman explicitly stated that the aid he was requesting would not be military: "I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes." Truman presented aid to Greece and Turkey as mere money to make good on the far larger investment of lives and treasure during World War II: "The assistance that I am recommending for Greece and Turkey amounts to little more than 1 tenth of 1 per cent of this investment. It is only common sense that we should safeguard this investment and make sure that it was not in vain."

The Korean War changed that by requiring quick American military intervention to prevent the collapse of South Korea in the summer of 1950, but when it bogged down into a stalemate after the Chinese intervention in November, the public quickly soured on the war. In January 1951, "49% thought the decision was a mistake, while 38% said it was not, and 13% had no opinion," according to Gallup. While those numbers fluctuated over the next two years, and more Americans thought the war was not a mistake whenever an end to the war was in sight, the American public in general did not support military actions that led to substantial American casualties and prolonged combat. The public's disillusionment with the war was one of the reasons that an increasingly unpopular President Truman decided not to run for reelection in 1952.

The next president, Dwight Eisenhower, moved quickly to end that war, and, more importantly, instituted a foreign policy that had at its core the principle of avoidance of any Korea-style wars in the future. Rather than engage in limited wars in every world hot spot, Eisenhower determined that such a course would bankrupt the country. He preferred "massive retaliation": the idea that a threat to essential American interests would be met with a nuclear threat, not a conventional response in kind. Even when the French faced defeat in Vietnam, Eisenhower refused to intervene, and never seriously considered deploying American troops to Vietnam.

While John Kennedy came into office criticizing that approach, pledging to "pay any price, bear any burden," the sobering experience of the Cuban missile crisis made him rethink that mindset. The cold war, he said in June 1963, imposed "burdens and dangers to so many countries," and specifically noted that the US and Soviet Union "bear the heaviest burdens." He spoke of the American aversion to war: "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough -- more than enough -- of war and hate and oppression."

While one may argue that Kennedy's policies led to the next American war in Vietnam under his successor Lyndon Johnson, it is also the case that Johnson sought to avoid a land war. Significantly, he looked first to use air power. Operation Rolling Thunder, the American air campaign against North Vietnam, was meant to forestall the need for American ground troops in large numbers. It was only after the clear failure of bombing to achieve American aims that Johnson escalated the war with more ground troops.

When that effort too proved futile, Richard Nixon again returned to air power as America's main instrument to maintain order abroad. His Vietnamizaion policy tried to balance the withdrawal of American troops with the deployment of increased air power. The "Nixon Doctrine," announced that henceforth "we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested in accordance with our treaty commitments. But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense." In other words, America's friends should not expect American troops to do their fighting for them.

I'd argue that from Nixon up until George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, that was American policy. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all avoided open-ended military commitments of American troops (Clinton's air-only campaign against Serbia in 1999 is the best example).

Only the first war against Iraq in 1991 challenged that trend, and even that war involved a longer preliminary air campaign than a ground one: five weeks of bombing preceded the ground campaign, which lasted only 100 hours. According to Colin Powell, Bush had the Vietnam War in mind when he resisted the calls of "on to Baghdad." Bush "had promised the American people that Desert Storm would not become a Persian Gulf Vietnam," Powell writes in his memoir, "and he kept his promise." Within two weeks of the ceasefire, the 540,000 U.S. troops began their withdrawal from the Persian Gulf.

Even the American war in Afghanistan in 2001 was planned to keep the American "footprint" light, relying on American air power and the Afghan Northern Alliance to do much of the fighting. It was the invasion and prolonged occupation of Iraq beginning in 2003 that predictably soured Americans once again on the prospect of extended military engagements.

In sum, what Americans are experiencing now is not exceptional, but rather normal. In the aftermath of extended, costly military interventions leading to the loss of American lives, the American people revert to their historical aversion to solving problems by fighting in and occupying foreign states. That does not mean the United States ceases to be relevant, or ceases to lead. It simply means that Americans have been reminded once again that not every problem can be solved by an invasion, and that leadership is more than a reflexive application of American military might.

British Diplomacy and Royal Baby Mania

A new heir to a powerless throne was born last week, and a portion of the American public went into a collective tizzy over it. Predictably, another portion went into a tizzy over that, and muttered some variant of "George Washington [or some other Founder] must be rolling over in this grave."

As an American of Irish descent, I don't go in much for British royalty worship, but I suppose it is no more harmful than many other types of American celebrity adoration. But these two types of responses got me thinking about the nature of the American relationship with the former mother country.

For the vast majority of living Americans, it has always been the "special relationship," but that is actually of fairly recent vintage, forged in the crucible of World War II (and visually captured by this image of FDR and Churchill, meeting on a British naval vessel in August 1941, singing "Onward Christian Soldiers").

As so often happens, the memory of the living is incomplete.

One need not go back to the Revolution to find Americans who would be appalled at the sight of last week's American attention to a British royal birth. For at least the first century after American independence, Britain was the enemy of the United States: at war from 1812 to 1815, at odds for most the next few decades (including a near-war over Oregon in 1846), no other country caused 19th century American presidents more consternation than Britain.

Not even fighting on the same side in the first World War completely changed that. American Anglophobia was still alive as FDR and Churchill were meeting in the summer of 1941. The United States was in the midst of the Great Debate over the extent of American involvement in World War II. Pearl Harbor lay months in the future, and isolationists continued to argue that the United States should not enter the war. There were plenty of Americans who rejected the idea that there was any "special relationship," or that American interests overlapped much with those of Great Britain.

While their arguments against American involvement were numerous, one is particularly relevant here: it would mean fighting for British imperialism. In April 1941, in a nationally broadcast radio debate, Fay Bennett, executive secretary of the Youth Committee Against War said: "if you have any faith that the British Empire is going to bring peace and democracy to the world, I would like one bit of evidence to that effect."

A particular focus of this line of argument was British rule in India. Gandhi's independence movement had put the British in the awkward position of fighting German imperialism in Europe while defending their own in Asia. As Churchill later said in November 1942, "we mean to hold our own. I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire."

The isolationist argument that America should not assist British imperialism was so common that an interventionist anticipated it in one debate: “I don’t think the present regime in England … and even what is going on in India—I suppose some of you people will want to bring that up—can in any way compare to the world we would have to live in if Hitler were the victor.”

The defenders of aid to Britain often resorted not to appeals to any "special relationship," but instead fell back on the idea that the British were simply the lesser of evils in this fight.

Pearl Harbor ended all that, as the German declaration of war brought the U.S. fully into the war on the same side as Great Britain, and Churchill came to the U.S. and lived at the White House for several weeks.

That result was no accident, however. It was the product of over 40 years of wise diplomacy by the British Foreign Office, which surveyed the world situation in the 1890s and made a conscious decision to cultivate American friendship. It saw three rising powers in the world: the U.S., Germany, and Japan. It could not successfully oppose all three, so Britain choose to accommodate the rise of American power and hoped to enlist it in the fight to thwart the other two. In December 1941, Britain saw that decision pay off magnificently, as America joined forces with Britain to defeat the designs of Germany and Japan.

I'm quite confident that officials of the British Foreign Office never anticipated American "royal baby mania" in 2013. In some sense, however, the unthinking American adoption of the British royal family witnessed last week is also an unintended product of their diplomacy.

The Enduring Appeal of the "Great Leader" Myth

“Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask. Really? Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?”

That's probably my favorite joke from President Obama's Correspondents Dinner routine, because it exposes the silliness of some of the criticism he's taken for his alleged lack of leadership. If only he'd spend more time schmoozing with members of Congress, then he might be able to get more legislation passed. Right. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner would just love to help the president with his agenda if only Obama would spend more time with them.

This kind of critique is all too common, because it is all too easy. Truly understanding the power dynamics of the House and the Senate, as well as the Republican and Democratic parties, is hard work. It is so much easier to just say the president hasn't led, and pretend there is some easy and obvious solution to the problem; say, schmoozing.

This is, of course, nothing new. I've been working for the last few weeks on the historical literature on the period before Pearl Harbor, and there are plenty of historians who level the same charge of lack of leadership at FDR. One of the more egregious examples comes from Stephen Ambrose. Charging that FDR's pre-Pearl Harbor policy was a "dismal failure," he slams Roosevelt for failing to convince the American people to go to war with Germany before the Japanese attack.

Ambrose notes that polls showed the public was against declaring war up until Dec. 7, 1941. "What the polls could not measure," Ambrose writes, "was how attitudes might have changed had presidential leadership been stiffer." Leaving aside the rather important question of whether or not FDR actually wanted all-out war with Germany at that point (and I am not convinced he did), Ambrose never says what "stiffer" leadership could have been.

Since the war in Europe began, FDR had consistently and persistently argued that a German victory in the war would be a disaster for the United States. He urged greater and greater assistance for Britain as its needs grew in order to prevent that outcome. No one who reads what FDR said over those two years can have any doubt that he made the strongest possible argument against Nazi Germany. Yet to Ambrose, somehow or other, FDR's leadership should have been "stiffer." There was something else he could have said that magically would have convinced the public to support a declaration of war on Hitler, even though Hitler had not declared war on the United States.

The flip side of this kind of thinking is similarly to attribute whatever political success a president enjoys to leadership--usually in the form of giving a speech. That was on full display last week in the New York Times on the 50th anniversary of JFK's civil rights speech. In a news piece entitled "When Presidential Words Led to Swift Action," Adam Clymer writes: "These days it is hard to imagine a single presidential speech changing history," but the civil rights speech is now seen as a "critical turning point." In an op-ed piece entitled "Kennedy’s Finest Moment," Peniel E. Joseph says it "might have been the single most important day in civil rights history."

Now, I think the speech is important--I always talk about it when teaching about the civil rights movement. But "most important day"? Or "critical turning point"? Hardly.

Clymer says the speech "led quickly and directly to important changes." In fact, the speech did neither.

The Civil Rights Act, which JFK proposed that night, was passed more than a year later (MLK's March on Washington two months after JFK's speech was in response to the lack of quick movement in Congress). That legislation's passage was not directly due to the speech, but the efforts of LBJ (who was aided greatly by the fact that JFK's death allowed him to portray the legislation as a tribute to the martyred president) and bipartisan support in Congress.

More importantly, what both pieces neglect is that the speech is not a good example of presidential leadership (at least not in the sense that they mean it). By the time the Civil Rights Act became law, ten years had passed since the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education case stated that separate is inherently unequal. That decade was marked primarily not by presidential leadership, but by grassroots organizing and protest. Before giving that speech, JFK had spent two and half years riding the fence on civil rights, while sit-ins and freedom rides and demonstrations relentlessly pushed the issue into the public consciousness. What forced JFK at last to take sides was the movement, specifically recent events in Birmingham. Whatever you call that, it wasn't "leadership."

Presidents do not make history on their own, however much some people like to pretend they do. FDR famously once told a group of supporters that he agreed with what they wanted him to do. "Now make me do it," he added.

That's how democracy works. Leaders have no magic wands that they can wave. The people have to demand that it get done, and create the political pressure. In June 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt met with some supporters who were frustrated with the lack of progressive reform in recent years. She said to them:

If you believe in democracy, you have got to work for the majority and have got to be willing to wait for it. I have done organization work practically all my life and I know that until you organize a thing down to the precincts and get a real demand from there up, there is not that majority demand for the thing and you cannot get it. You come away with the feeling that the President is willing to lead, but never too far in advance of public opinion, because that is the way things work in a democracy as understood by a politician and a democrat.

The people who don't understand that are often neither politicians nor democrats, but ideologues who are so utterly convinced of the virtue of their positions that they cannot imagine that anything other than incompetence or malice could be standing in the way of achieving their self-evidently desirable goals. They want the leader to simply do it, already!

This idea of "great person" leadership is not only mistaken, it is profoundly undemocratic. When critics bellyache about the lack of leadership, they are often betraying an authoritarian impulse to impose their own views on others, without doing the hard work of convincing others that it is the right way to go. You've got to be willing to wait for it. As frustrating as that work can be, it certainly beats dictatorship by the ideologically certain.

Yes, presidents matter. Speeches matter. Stating where one stands matters. But mostly, change comes when people decide that change matters.

Health Insurance and the Bipartisan Canard

While most people on the left felt some satisfaction at the way Vice-President Joe Biden challenged Rep. Paul Ryan at last week's debate, there's one Romney campaign talking point that I wish Biden had demolished: that President Obama has not been bipartisan.

In the presidential debate, Mitt Romney touted his record as governor of Massachusetts: "I figured out from Day 1 I had to get along, and I had to work across the aisle to get anything done." An extensive New York Times article on Romney's record as governor notes that the reality was rather different: "Bipartisanship was in short supply." But put that aside. Let's give Romney the benefit of the doubt and accept his characterization that he governed in a bipartisan manner.

His great bipartisan achievement in Massachusetts was of course health insurance reform, which included at the state level the same individual mandate that conservatives now argue is tyranny when implemented by the federal government. Romney's claim to bipartisanship is that the Democratic legislature voted along with Republicans for his bill. Fair enough.

But what does that story tell us? The key to the wide bipartisan support for the bill was the simple fact that Sen. Ted Kennedy urged Massachusetts Democrats to support it, even though it contained what was then the conservative idea of an individual mandate. In short, the Democrats in the legislature, in order to achieve a liberal goal (universal coverage), agreed to a conservative method (individual mandate) of getting there. That was a bipartisan decision.

Fast forward to 2009-2010. President Obama, in the national debate on health insurance, tried to do exactly the same thing: in order to achieve a liberal goal, he agreed to a conservative method of getting there. He refused to stand with liberal Democrats who wanted a single-payer system--that was a non-starter with conservatives. He refused to go to the mat for a public option--that was also a non-starter for conservatives. He supported a solution that would increase the customers for private health insurance companies by using the power of government to encourage (and subsidize) the purchase of private insurance through the individual mandate. He did so to get conservative support for the idea.

You can't get much more bipartisan than that.

But, as Romney and Ryan are fond of pointing out, Obama's health care bill received zero Republican votes. Why? 

To hear Romney and Ryan tell the story, it was because Obama did not take a bipartisan approach. That is patently false. 

The real reason is that Republicans did not want health insurance reform to get done. They did not want President Obama to get anything done. 

According to Robert Draper's book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do -- Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican leaders of Congress met on inauguration day in 2009 and decided to oppose every substantive proposal the president put forward. Their simple strategy was this:

Show united and unyielding opposition to the President's economic policies. 
Win the spear point of the House in 2010.
Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011.
Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.

Paul Ryan was one of the participants at that meeting. He knows that it was the policy of his party to deny the president any Republican votes on any significant issue.

Nonetheless, Ryan had the unmitigated gall to say at the debate: "Different than this administration, we actually want to have big bipartisan agreements."

The simple fact of the matter is that no one--no one--can get bipartisan agreements when one of the two parties has decided beforehand that their own partisan political goals are more important than achieving anything substantive for the country.

On a purely political level, there is a certain brilliance to the Republican strategy. Take advantage of Obama's sincere willingness to reach bipartisan compromise and use it to wring every possible concession to conservative ideas while the details of the legislation are being debated. Then force him to try to pass the legislation with only Democratic votes. He either fails to pass it at all (a win for the GOP) or he passes it without Republican votes and then the GOP slams him for failing to be bipartisan (also a win for the GOP). 

The losers, unfortunately, are the American people. But Republicans in their inauguration day meeting made it crystal clear that their own future political victories, not the welfare of the public, was their top priority.

So when Paul Ryan said, with incredibly hypocritical sanctimony, that he and Mitt Romney were all for bipartisanship, I wish Joe Biden had said something like FDR said in his Syracuse speech in 1936:

Remember, too, that the first essential of doing a job well is to want to see the job done. Make no mistake about this: the Republican leadership today is not against the way we have done the job. The Republican leadership is against the job's being done.

That is as true today as it was then. We know what "bipartisan" means to today's Republican Party: unconditional surrender by the Democrats. What Biden should have said to Ryan is this: President Obama will seize every chance for true bipartisanship. But he will not submit to blackmail by a party that values its own electoral victories over the well-being of the American people.

That's a winning message.

The Archie Bunker "Wisdom" is Running High

You might think that the fact that one of my first year students two weeks ago said the exact same thing that the dean of Washington pundits wrote Sunday in his column would cause me to swell with pride.  Problem is, they're both wrong.

In my class, we were discussing Milo Minderbinder, Joseph Heller's satirical stand-in for the unrestrained business ethos in his brilliant novel, Catch-22.  We were talking about why Heller included this character, and my student said: "World War II ended the depression."  David Broder on Sunday wrote the same thing.  In a bizarre article, Broder suggests that President Obama’s political fortunes in 2012 could be enhanced by a war with Iran: “Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.”

While it is stunning to hear Broder (someone who should know better) do so, I was not surprised that my student echoed this mistaken conventional wisdom.  I've been fighting this fundamental misunderstanding for as long as I've been teaching.  I think the first time I heard it was from the lips of Archie Bunker in Norman Lear's classic sitcom, "All in the Family."  In every class in which I've dealt with the Great Depression, I've heard this refrain repeated.

It's a classic case of mistaking historical causation.  It is indeed true that the U.S. fully emerged from the depression after the war began.  Despite Broder's implication, there's nothing magical about wars that ends depressions.  What ended the Great Depression was that the war removed all restraint on federal government spending.

A quick look at the numbers makes this clear.  While the same ill-informed conventional wisdom has it that the New Deal led to massive government spending, that is not true. In 1933, total federal spending was about $4.6 billion. It reached a New Deal height of $8.3 billion in 1936, much of that due to spending on the WPA, a jobs program that employed millions of Americans and built infrastructure (the stimulus bill of its day).  The economy improved, but spending was cut in 1937 to $7.6 billion and in 1938 to $6.9 billion, leading to what was called the “Roosevelt recession,” which wiped out many of the economic gains of the previous four years.

The huge increase in government spending came NOT from jobs programs like the WPA, or other New Deal social welfare programs, but from military spending.  In 1939, the federal budget jumped to $9.1 billion, in 1941 it was up to 13.6 billion, with almost all of that increase due to defense preparedness spending.  Once the U.S. entered the war, spending exploded.  By 1944 it was $91.3 billion—more than ten times the New Deal height.  The deficit that year was $47.5 billion, more than ten times the $4.3 billion deficit of 1936.  That is what ended the depression.

How?  The U.S. had tremendous underused industrial capacity during the depression.  What was lacking was demand.  Orders for military goods created demand.  When events in Europe and Asia made the prospect of American involvement in war more likely, FDR announced what were ridiculed as unreachable military production goals.  Not only did American industry meet his goals, it generally exceeded them.  In 1942, for example, the U.S. produced more planes than the three Axis powers combined.

The reason for this production success was fairly simple.  The federal government met its defense needs by granting cost-plus contracts: all of industry's costs (including labor) were met by the federal government, and a profit was guaranteed to contractors (talk about a bailout).  Millions of blue-collar workers were suddenly not only employed, but making good wages (often including overtime pay).  Business had profits to reinvest.  That meant that workers found themselves flush with disposable income.  They both spent and saved.  The increased consumer spending led to wartime prosperity and unprecedented economic growth, and after the war consumers spent their savings on goods (like cars) not available during the war due to wartime rationing, continuing the economic boom into the postwar years.

In short, war did not produce prosperity, massive government spending did.  The relevance of this truth about World War II prosperity is not Broder's mistaken belief that war ends depression, but that it helps explain why the American economy today is still struggling to revive.

As much most American voters seem convinced that we are today spending too much, that the stimulus bill was an abject failure, the reality is that, like the WPA spending in 1935-36, the stimulus was helpful but was not enough.  And the likely cost of this historical and economic ignorance is that Americans are poised to elect tomorrow a Congress that will make the same mistake that FDR made in 1937 and cut spending, and may send the fragile American economy into a new recession.

When Archie and Edith Bunker sang “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again” in the 1970s, it was funny.  When today Americans from David Broder to a typical college student think the same, and worse yet vote accordingly, it is potentially tragic.

Why Obama isn't FDR

A year ago, the press was full of comparisons of President Obama to FDR. It seemed natural enough. Both men came to power in the midst of a national economic crisis, with large ambitions--not just to solve the immediate crisis but to bring about historic change.

A year later, few observers would compare Obama's first year favorably to Roosevelt's. We are deluged with stories of a presidency on the ropes, repudiated by the voters, etc. In part, this is simply a product of our news culture's obsessive, minute-by-minute microscopic analysis of what has changed politically in the last 24 hours. But there is no doubt that to some extent, the bloom is off the rose. What happened?

I would argue that the most important factor is one little appreciated a year ago. In the midst of all of the New Deal talk in early 2009, a friend asked me what I thought about the comparison. My reply was that there was one major difference. It was as if FDR took over not in early 1933, as he did, but in early 1930. At that point, the crash had occurred several months earlier, and the economy was certainly on a downward trajectory, but no one knew that what was coming would soon be known as the Great Depression.

In other words, things just weren't bad enough when Obama came into office for the comparison to be valid. No, I'm not suggesting that it would have been somehow better if things had been worse--I'm simply pointing out that, in strictly political terms, FDR had more room to maneuver than Obama did in his first year because the economy was in such a shambles in 1933 and most Americans blamed his Republican opposition for that state of affairs.

In retrospect, most historians and economists agree that the winter of 1932-33 was the absolute low point of the depression, so when FDR actually took over, there was no doubt that the country was suffering the worst economic calamity in its history. Not only that, but for three long years, the previous administration's attempts to grapple with the disaster had shown no results. The bankruptcy of Republican policies was manifest and undeniable, and as a result, Democrats would successfully run against Herbert Hoover and his political ghost for the next 20-30 years.

In that environment, FDR came into office with as close to a blank check from Congress as any president has ever had. It passed the Emergency Banking Act a mere five days after FDR's inauguration and within several hours of it being presented to Congress, with few members even knowing what was in it, much less having read it.

Roosevelt's party also had greater margins in both Houses. Democrats had a 312-117 majority in the House, 60-35 in the Senate (it would grow to 69-25 after the 1934 elections). Not only that, but both parties were more ideologically diverse then than they are today. Many of the Congressional Republicans who had survived politically were old progressives like senators William Borah of Idaho and Hiram Johnson of California, men who were in the mold of FDR's cousin Theodore and supported many of the younger Roosevelt's initiatives, regardless of the fact that they were members of the other party.

But imagine if FDR had moved into the White House in early 1930. Before it was clear that the nation was entering a severe, historic depression. Before the bankruptcy of Republican policies of the last ten years became clear. And while the depression deepened inexorably.

This is effectively the situation Obama walked into--with one major difference. In the fall of 2008, as the financial system threatened to implode, all informed observers, of all political stripes, knew effective action had to be taken, and quickly. And Obama wisely made common cause with the Bush administration in approving the now universally unpopular TARP bill.

There is no exact parallel with FDR, but the one that comes closest is illuminating. In the months between the 1932 election and the inauguration in March 1933, the banking system effectively collapsed. In that period, Hoover tried repeatedly to enlist FDR in some kind of joint action, and the president-elect resisted. His critics, with some justification, have charged FDR with putting politics ahead of the national good. But as FDR and his people saw it, in the words of biographer Ted Morgan, "Why should he risk the contamination of a discredited administration?"

In contrast, that, in effect, is what Obama did--he risked the contamination of the discredited Bush administration on TARP. He put the national interest first. His personal political interest has not been well served. By supporting TARP, and then getting Congress to enact the stimulus bill, Obama has helped prevent the panic of 2008 from turning into another great depression.

But he gets no political credit for preventing what did not happen, and arguably has prevented the public from seeing (and suffering) the full consequences of the reckless policies of the Republican president and Congress that preceded him. Instead of getting credit, he endures carping from the right that the stimulus didn't work because unemployment went up. He gets blamed by the left for an ineffectual leadership's failure to pass health care reform.

Yes, it would have been better for Obama politically to have come into office in today's equivalent of 1933. But it would not have been better for the rest of us.

Andre Bauer's Abuse of History

[Note: the post below is an expanded version of my letter to the editor published today in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal.]

This past Sunday, South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer published an op-ed piece in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal to respond to criticism of this now well-reported statement comparing people on government assistance to stray animals:

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that."

Bauer has been forced to back off this specific metaphor, but he clearly thinks he has a winning issue in the race for the Republican nomination for governor in his attacks on what he calls “the culture of dependency.”

Put aside the disturbing implications of Bauer’s use of this particular metaphor. Put aside even the not-very-subtle racial code language implied by its last sentence. It is his abuse of historical evidence I’d like to talk about.

In this opinion piece, Andre Bauer tries a rhetorical trick. In attacking the “culture of dependency,” Bauer ominously intones “we were warned.” He then proceeds to quote Franklin D. Roosevelt, from his 1935 State of the Union address, on the dangers of dependency: “The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole our relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.” If even the father of modern American liberalism was against relief, Bauer indirectly suggests, then how can anyone criticize my view?

The quotation is accurate, as far as it goes. It is, however, incredibly selective—so much so that Bauer effectively creates a false impression of what FDR was really saying.

Before the section Bauer quoted, FDR proposed what would become Social Security: “the time has come for action by the National Government. I shall send to you in a few days definite recommendations … [which] will cover the broad subjects of unemployment insurance and old-age insurance, of benefits for children, for mothers, for the handicapped, for maternity care, and for other aspects of dependency and illness where a beginning can now be made.” In short, FDR had just proposed precisely the kind of social safety net Bauer decries in his op-ed.

It gets worse. FDR’s attack on relief was not in isolation. It was to set the stage for his proposal for the WPA, and his request for the largest single peacetime appropriation in American history to give people jobs. Yes, he opposed relief to the unemployed, but in the absence of relief, he proposed to use government to create jobs for them: “It is a duty dictated by every intelligent consideration of national policy to ask you [Congress] to make it possible for the United States to give employment to all of these three-and-a-half million people now on relief, pending their absorption in a rising tide of private employment.” FDR was not calling simply for an end to relief, he was calling on Congress to replace relief with work. And he was not willing to wait for private enterprise to provide those jobs. He wanted people to have the dignity of work, and wanted to mobilize government to make sure they had it.

(I’ve seen this kind of selective quotation before, but it is usually in freshmen essays, and it always results in the spilling of a lot red ink from my grading pen and an appropriately low grade. We should be able to expect better of someone who presumes to govern a state.)

FDR offered people on relief real jobs and real income instead of relief. Andre Bauer offers them nothing but self-righteous and self-satisfied homilies. He wants us to know that “as a child I chose to cut grass and rake leaves” to pay for his lunches. But what he proposed was to cut off school lunch benefits to children if their parents failed to attend parent-teacher conferences. FDR proposed helping those who found themselves in need through no fault of their own, children in particular; Bauer proposed punishing children for the failings of their parents.

FDR’s WPA provided funding for the Santee Cooper project, which put thousands of South Carolinians to work and today still provides electricity to over 130,000 South Carolinians. Bauer opposed the recent stimulus bill—though he quickly distanced himself from Gov. Sanford’s stand against accepting the money marked for South Carolina. Since the stimulus was a fact, he argued in March 2009, South Carolinians should get their share of the benefits: “people are in need and if stimulus is purchased with your dollars, the stimulus ought to be available to you. Why send the money and jobs elsewhere?” Evidently people have their characters ruined by federal money, but states don’t.

The crowning irony of his self-serving article is that in it Bauer whines that his “historical understanding” is being attacked by critics of his tone-deaf statement. But Bauer’s misuse of FDR’s words shows that he is either ignorant of history and thus deserves the attacks, or that he is willing to knowingly abuse history to advance his political career. Neither choice is very appealing.