Inside Report for Dec. 1, 2011
Woe it is in this holiday season to be a Democrat. The party supposedly in power sees a Congress snarled in disputes over a Democratic president’s initiatives. Millions are out of work, and long-term unemployment is the surest driver of discontent.
No president has ever been re-elected with these levels of joblessness. The pre-election winter is grim as the polls, and the Republicans are in resurgence.
Even businessmen formerly in the president’s camp are turning into critics. Words like “socialism” are commonly thrown around to stigmatize the Democratic agenda.
This is a president who is not disliked but despised by those who believe themselves the “job creators.”
“He never went through the grim competitive battle that every man must endure who fights his way from scratch,” goes a bitter passage in Fortune magazine. “His experience with business has been narrowly limited. Most of his life has been spent in politics.”
Fortune reported the near-unanimous opposition of the business community to the president’s re-election. Corporate money is readily available to the opposition.
If the opposition of the right is bad, there is grumbling from the left that despite the market crash the administration has not done enough to curb Wall Street’s excesses. Now and again, public protests turn into brawls as liberals go public with their disappointment with the administration. Even the president’s offers to compromise on specific bills provoke angst from the true believers among the Democrats. Several Republicans seek the presidential nomination, which is thought to be one of the most winnable in years, despite the president’s big victory four years ago. A Republican-leaning poll shows a landslide for the GOP, but a hard-bitten professor of statistics at Harvard University prepares a corrected analysis that shows only a 2-to-1 vote in the Electoral College against the president.
It is December 1935. “That man in the White House” is Franklin D. Roosevelt.
And the end of the story is that the Republicans would go down to historic defeat in November 1936. In those days, New Haven in Connecticut was a conservative town. Its early returns showed a 15,000-vote lead that “must be wrong,” as Roosevelt said at his home in Hyde Park. “Wow,” the president said when told the numbers were correct. It was the harbinger of a landslide so comprehensive that it still beggars the imagination of political statisticians.
As Arthur M. Schlesinger wrote in his history of the New Deal, Roosevelt won the largest presidential vote to that time, the largest presidential plurality, the largest proportion of electoral votes since 1820 — and that was when James Monroe was almost unopposed. Only Maine and Vermont held for the Republicans, and someone hung a sign over a bridge leading from New Hampshire into Maine: “You Are Now Leaving the United States.”
Will history repeat itself? Well, not necessarily. Barack Obama is not Franklin Roosevelt.
Nor does the public remember Obama’s predecessor with the contempt that it held then for Herbert Hoover. Running against his predecessor’s record is not as easily done as many Democratic spokesman did then, evoking the nightmares of the first Depression years. But if there is one lesson of that year of discontent for Roosevelt in 1935, it is that an incumbent president has vast strengths in terms of setting an agenda and raising himself from the political operating table.
Obama should take note: Roosevelt made the campaign a referendum not on the New Deal in detail but on Americans’ belief, taken from the poet Dante, that “divine justice weights the sins of the cold-blooded and the sings of the warm-hearted in different scales.”
“Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference,” Roosevelt said.
A Republican triumph is indeed possible next year. But it’s not inevitable.
Lanny Keller is an editorial writer for
The Advocate. His e-mail address is
lkeller@theadvocate.com.