Barack Hoover Obama?

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"Many of the administration's pet stimulus programs have joined Jerry Ford's 'Whip Inflation Now' buttons on the junkpile of history: green jobs, cash for clunkers, debt relief for homeowners, and now, by the President's own admission, 'shovel–ready' infrastructure projects."

Walter Russell Mead
The American Interest

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No matter what you think of Barack Obama or the Republicans who are vying to replace him, you should read Walter Russell Mead's piece in The American Interest.

Mead's article caught my attention because, ever since it became apparent in 2008 that, first, Obama would be the Democrats' presidential nominee and, second, he would be elected, there has been no shortage of those who were eager to label him the second coming of another American president — during and after the campaign, he was going to be "another Lincoln" as he tried to heal the nation's racial wounds or "another FDR," as he resolved an economic crisis.

For awhile, it was said that he would be "another JFK," picking up the progressive torch that Kennedy dropped in Dallas in 1963. And, in the aftermath of the setbacks Obama's party suffered in last year's midterms, there have even been comparisons to a Republican icon, Ronald Reagan, who was re–elected in a landslide two years after a midterm drubbing.

Obama continues to inspire comparisons — only those comparisons have turned in a more ominous direction — which brings me back to Mead's article.

Now, The American Interest is a largely nonpartisan publication that focuses on foreign policy issues and international economics — so you might want to keep that in mind whenever you read any opinion pieces that appear on its pages.

But give Mead's message some thought.

Obama, he writes, misinterpreted the results of the 2008 election, and that set in motion a potentially catastrophic series of events for his presidency.

"Midway through 2010, President Obama looked less like Lincoln redux and more like a Clinton manqué," opines Mead. "By the end of that year, the penultimate dissing of the President began; friends and foes began to ask whether President Obama might not be, gasp, the new Jimmy Carter."

(Now, personally, I liked Carter. I thought he was a decent guy, and I thought his policies had the country on sound footing. Like today's Obama defenders, I told people that all Carter's policies needed was time.

(But I was young, and I soon learned that voters have little patience when the economy turns mean.

(And it's a lot meaner now than it ever was under Carter.)

Carter's image has been rehabilitated considerably since he left the White House three decades ago, but he remains a political anathema. The mention of his name conjures up images of failure, of malaise (even though Carter never used that word) — even among those who have always considered themselves his supporters.

That the Obama Administration could end up being remembered by history as an early 21st century version of the Carter presidency is a "best–case scenario" for the Instapundit blog, Mead points out — and, in the minds of most Americans who remember Carter and the beating he took from Reagan when he sought re–election, that can be damning enough.

But Mead worries that a more dire specter hovers over the president and it ought to send a chill down the spine of every Democrat — "the ghost of Herbert Hoover."

If there is a name that is linked in American history with economic disaster, it is the name of Herbert Hoover.

No president wants to be remembered as his generation's Herbert Hoover.

Mead starts by pointing out all the surface similarities — and there are plenty of those — between two men who were elected 80 years apart.

• Both Hoover and Obama were products of broken homes;


• both were widely traveled;


• both had wives who were "unusually well educated and assertive;"


• both were "unconventional candidate[s] who came into office on a tidal wave of support;"


• both had modest political resumes and "went deep into enemy territory" for support when they were elected, winning states that hadn't voted for their parties in many years;


• Hoover was seen as the "great progressive of his day," Mead writes;


• and Hoover's ticket — with a Native American running mate — was the "most diverse" in the nation's history until 2008.


• In fact, no matter how he may be perceived today, Hoover came to the presidency with a sense of idealism that would rival Obama's.
  
  Hoover "was a strong supporter of disarmament ... began the withdrawal of U.S. forces his predecessors had committed ... sought to avoid confrontational U.S. statements and to downplay possible grounds for conflict" and his "strong humanitarian instincts ... made him reluctant to use force but also left him concerned about the well being of people in other countries."

Well, that mostly addresses foreign policy. How about economics? That, writes Mead, is what "should worry" the White House and its supporters.

"[D]espite his long record of progressive politics, his personal appeal and his sympathy for the downtrodden," writes Mead, "President Hoover is best remembered for failing to master the Great Depression."

It isn't hopeless for Obama, Mead says. "The Great Recession is not as crushing as the Great Depression," he writes, "but President Obama's problems in the face of economic turmoil are beginning to look Hooveresque."

However ...

"Like Hoover, President Obama faces the possibility of a devastating second downturn due to economic problems in Europe — and like President Hoover, President Obama can't do much to prevent it. Like Hoover, President Obama is harried by a domestic populist revolt against his leadership and the policies he supports and like Hoover, President Obama's once unassailable popularity is being slowly ground down by economic bad news."

But time is getting short for Obama.

"Lincoln, Clinton, Carter, Hoover: that is a trajectory no President should want," Mead writes, "nor will the country benefit from 18 more months of Presidential subsidence."

The Quest for a 'New Deal'

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In the lifetimes of my parents and others from their generation, there may have been no more consequential election than the election of 1932, which happens to be the subject of Kenneth Walsh's latest article in U.S. News & World Report.

My father was born in December 1929 — less than two months after the stock market crashed. My mother was born in August 1931. They were both children during the Depression, but their parents knew what a struggle it was to make ends meet, and the ongoing fight for survival left its mark on them, as it did nearly everyone who lived through that period.

My mother was a little more than 1 year old when Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated President Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election — obviously, she had no memory of it. And my father turned 3 between the election and FDR's inauguration — while he's never spoken about it, I'm sure he has no recollection of it, either.

But I heard them speak of how shocking it was when, as teenagers in 1945, they heard that the only president they had ever known (through radio and newsreels) died. (That makes me wonder how the people of Great Britain will react when Queen Elizabeth, who is the only monarch any Briton under the age of 60 has ever known, dies.)

When I was minoring in history as a graduate student, I took a class on presidential elections. Each student was assigned a semester project — to write a term paper on a losing campaign for the presidency. But we had to write about a campaign that was about 60 years or more in the past — we couldn't just write about the most recent loser (which, at that time, would have been Michael Dukakis).

My professor wanted us to do research using primary and secondary sources, and we had to discuss our findings in class — after providing copies of our papers for our classmates to read ahead of time. It certainly made for some lively class discussions.

Anyway, I wrote about Hoover's ultimately unsuccessful campaign for re-election. And, as a journalism major, I enjoyed looking through old newspapers and seeing how they reported the news of the day in 1932.

The news, as you would expect, was not pleasant.

One-third of Americans were out of work that year. When Roosevelt came to the Democratic convention to accept the nomination in person — which was an historic act itself — he promised a "new deal" to America's working men. It was a promise he implemented when he took office in March of 1933.

Wherever Roosevelt went in the campaign of 1932, he drew large, boisterous crowds. Hoover, meanwhile, was widely blamed for the nation's woes and drew much smaller, less enthusiastic crowds.

My research suggested that everyone, even Hoover's supporters, believed (correctly, as it turned out) there would be massive change in the November election.

Hoover was born in Iowa, but his residence, as an adult, was in California. One of the books I used as a source for my research paper noted that, as Hoover concluded his campaign and returned to California to cast his vote, a telegram was waiting for him. It advised, "Vote for Roosevelt, and make it unanimous."

The 1932 election was, as Walsh indicates, a realigning election. Roosevelt's victory broke a 12-year Republican grip on the White House and began the Democrats' 20-year hold on it. Democrats also extended their majority in the House and captured control of the Senate.

"FDR would go on to win three more terms and lead America to victory in World War II," Walsh writes. "In the process, he became one of the nation's most beloved presidents and built a vast and powerful governing coalition."

That coalition, Walsh observes, of "working-class whites, union members, immigrants, African Americans, Southern whites, Catholics, Jewish voters, and city dwellers ... dominated American politics for more than a generation — another key part of FDR's legacy."

A PERSONAL NOTE: There should be two more articles in Walsh's series, which has followed a (mostly) chronological path for the last four or five weeks. If that continues through the next two Wednesdays, it can be assumed the last two articles will deal with elections that have been held since 1932.

I think one of those elections would have to be the election of 1968, which was clearly a realigning election in favor of the Republicans following the passage of the civil rights and voting rights acts.

The other consequential election? I'm going to guess it was 1984, when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to be nominated for a spot on a national ticket. She didn't help the Democrats, who lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan, but she made history.

But Walsh may not consider that consequential enough — in which case it would be conceivable that he will write about the 1980 election, when Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter.