Friday, December 10, 2010

Quote of the Day (Franklin Roosevelt, Defining Ideologies for His Age and Ours)


“A Radical is a man with both feet firmly planted— in the air. A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A Reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest-at the command—of his head.”—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Radio Address to the New York Herald Tribune Forum,” October 26, 1939

As with humor, Presidential decision-making often rests on a sense of timing, and even its master practitioners don’t always have it at their commands. FDR is a case in point.

Only two years before this address, he had erred drastically by attempting to “pack” the Supreme Court by enlarging that body so he could appoint more justices who shared his views. A year later, he compounded his mistake by trying to “purge” Congress of Democratic members whose leanings were more conservative than his own.

In 1939, however, as war clouds gathered in Europe, the President had recovered his equilibrium and sense of the possible. Though he had decided, six years before, right after the start of his administration, that Adolf Hitler was stark, raving mad, he knew that isolationist sentiment in the nation at this point would not allow him to confront the dictator directly. And so, he was at pains in this speech to deny the “remotest possibility of sending the boys of American mothers to fight on the battlefields of Europe.”

FDR had re-learned, at great cost to his ability to maneuver, the overwhelming power of political mathematics, and its consequent effect on what a President without enough votes could do. This past week, Barack Obama has shown the capacity to learn the same thing.

His party, however, continues to fail badly at political math, as they scream at the President’s compromise with Republicans on taxes. Like Blanche du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire, they don’t want realism but magic.

We know what happened to her, don’t we?

Not that the GOP is much good at math, either. Their plan to extend the Bush tax cuts for even the wealthiest Americans only promises to worsen the deficit. But if they don’t know how to count dollars, they sure know how to count votes.

If the Democrats did, they wouldn’t be in the fix they’re in now, having lost two votes on their own plan for tax breaks for everyone but the rich, as Gail Collins noted in her New York Times column. By their unwillingness to accept Obama's compromise, they risk everything—including extending the length of unemployment benefits to Americans very badly in need of these.


Just imagine how that's going to go down with thousands of people--who, though they might be out of work, still can vote.

A large portion of the Democratic liberal is even talking about challenging the President in the primaries. Good luck with that. Who’ll be their standard-bearer, Hilary Clinton? Nah--her support for the war in Afghanistan has been every bit as strong as the President's--and, as we saw in the astonishing press conference yesterday, her husband has come out with a full-throated defense of the compromise with the GOP.
Okay, Dennis Kucinich? Well, you might recall, he saw Cleveland fall into bankruptcy under his watch as mayor more than 30 years ago. How about Howard Dean? Not if you want an endless loop, the first time trouble hits during the race (as it certainly will), of that primal scream in the 2004 primaries.

Despite all this, Democrats hope against hope that there can be a repeat of 1995, when Bill Clinton induced the GOP into a classic case of rope-a-dope over shutting down the government.

They fail to see, however, that John Boehner is not Newt Gingrich. Amazingly enough, the leader of the GOP in the 1990s not only matched, but even exceeded Bill Clinton as a study in abnormal psychology. After all, Clinton might have believed he was a revolutionary, but Ol’ Newt actually blurted out this belief in his power to transform the world to White House budget honcho Richard Darman at the height of George H.W. Bush’s mano-a-mano with Congress in 1990. With an epic case of narcissism, Gingrich was a political accident waiting to happen, as promptly occurred when the press trumpeted his peevishness over having to sit at the back of Air Force One.

Boehner looks far more concerned with practicing his tan and his golf game than with his amour proper. In other words, the Democrats are going to wait a long, long time for another self-inflicted political wound from a GOP head.

Democrats who pride themselves on being “progressive” should take heart that Obama is a liberal according to FDR’s definition. If they continue to jump up and down and scream, though, they’ll themselves will be the great President’s definition of “Radical”—and find themselves on the outside looking in, for who knows how long.

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