FDR, Obama And Mandates
Posted on Mon Oct 20, 2008 at 11:47:59 AM EST
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Yesterday, I wrote about Jon Meacham's article about our Center Right country. In particular, I scoffed at Meacham's suggestion that FDR's Presidency provided an example of his thesis - that somehow FDR failed to win the ideological battle for Progressivism. Such talk is generally centered on FDR's failure to win primary battles in his own party in 1938. But it seems incredibly wrongheaded to me to judge FDR solely on that basis.
It would be ignoring everything that came before - when FDR revolutionized national government. Similarly, Matt Yglesias underestimates the power of the Presidency:
There’s a tendency to attribute FDR’s and LBJ’s achievements to something inherent to their character or their approach to governing, but the truth is simply that in 1933-34 and 1965-66 you had a lot of liberals in congress so a lot of liberal legislation passed.
This is simply not correct in my view. FDR had a lot of DEMOCRATS in his Congress, but they were not particularly liberal, even for the time. What there was was this new FDR creation, and in some ways, a very bad one, an Imperial Presidency:
The quantum leap in the president's power came with Franklin D. Roosevelt. He ushered in what historian's call "the imperial presidency." But the years from 1933 to 1945 were no ordinary time. When FDR took office and declared the Great Depression a "national emergency," few would disagree. In his first inaugural address, he announced that he would treat the Depression like a war. If Congress did not approve his policies for fixing the economy, he would take the same powers that presidents had previously assumed only in wartime. By the 1940s, he was a presiding over a nation literally at war. His powers became even greater. The emergencies of his day allowed him to take all that power with the blessing of most Americans.
Even Bill Clinton, a subject of Yglesias' post, benefited from this FDR creation - remember his 1993 budget barely passed on the strictest party lines (with Gore breaking the tie in the Senate.) Clinton was able to crack the whip on a Democratic Congress and get it passed. (Of course he could not do the same on health care as Yglesias properly points out.
There really seems to be a type of conspiracy to deny FDR his ideological victory. the funny thing is conservatives and Republicans know better. In 2007, Jonah Goldberg wrote:
[C]onservatives began to change their tune when the New Deal/Great Society consensus started to unravel and they discovered that the presidency could be theirs if they made peace with it.
Indeed, once Republicans and conservatives conceded that FDR had won the ideological battle in the country (23 years after FDR's death), Richard Nixon won the Presidency. But FDR won.
Circumstances create mandates for Presidents. Sometimes it is as a result of electoral landslides. Sometimes it is as a result of events (See 9/11.) It appears to me that the current crisis provides Barack Obama with opportunities that a Democratic President has not seen since LBJ's landslide win in 1964.
And these opportunities will not be dependent on the 41st most liberal member of the Senate, as Yglesias posits. I think it will depend on Obama himself.
Barack Obama the candidate has been good for the most part. Even on my terms (an aversion to the post-partisan unity schtick), Obama has been better. But the question now will be can he be an effective President in terms of forwarding a progressive agenda, or perhaps more interestingly, does he even want to? I think we will find out.
By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only
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