Frank Rich: Time For This Big Dog to Bite Back

[flpoljunkie]

September 11, 2010
Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back
By FRANK RICH

NO, he can’t. President Obama can’t reverse the unemployment numbers by Election Day. He can’t get even a modest new stimulus bill past the Party of No, and even if he could, there would be few jobs to show for it until (maybe) 2011. Nor can he rewrite the history of his administration. Its signal accomplishments to date are an initial stimulus package that was overrun by the calamity at hand and a marathon health care battle as yet better known for its unseemly orgy of backroom wrangling than its concrete results. While that brawl raged, the White House seemed indifferent to the mounting number of Americans being tossed onto the Great Recession scrapheap.

And so the odds that Obama’s party will survive the midterms seem less than Indiana Jones’s in the Temple of Doom — as we are reminded hourly by the Beltway herd flogging the latest polls. The Democrats are facing a “historic” rout, an earthquake, a tidal wave — well, you know the drill. End of story.

Unless it’s not. On Labor Day, the fighting Obama abruptly re-emerged, a far cry from the man whose Oval Office address on Iraq days earlier was about as persuasive as a hostage video. Speaking to workers in Milwaukee, the president finally started giving voice to the anger of America’s battered middle class. And he even let loose with a little anger of his own. The unspecified “powerful interests” aligned against him, he said, “talk about me like a dog.”

As many have noted, the obvious political model for Obama this year is Franklin Roosevelt, who at his legendary 1936 Madison Square Garden rally declared that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies in the realms of “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” As the historian David Kennedy writes in his definitive book on the period, “Freedom from Fear,” Roosevelt “had little to lose by alienating the right,” including those in the corporate elite, with such invective; they already detested him as vehemently as the Business Roundtable crowd does Obama.

Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.

F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/opinion/12rich.html?ref=frankrich

[Hawkowl]

1. Obama needs class warfare

If Obama wants to win future elections, he will grab the gauntlet that the rethuglikans have been slapping him silly with, and finally declare war on the monied elite, as Roosevelt did.

He is going to have to pick friends and make enemies. Or I should say, stop making enemies of the left and start acknowledging his enemies on the right.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

15. This is a false equivalency. Again, in 1934, American feelings toward government was much more

favorable. WIth all the Republican anti-government rhetoric that has prevailed over the last 30 years, it's hard to convince the average American that a "class warfare" strategy would work.

I think Frank Rich is being incredibly naive. And I love him, too. But on this issue, he is misguided.

[ProSense]

2. "NO, he can’t."? This is the kind of rewriting of history that distorts the administration's record

NO, he can’t. President Obama can’t reverse the unemployment numbers by Election Day. He can’t get even a modest new stimulus bill past the Party of No, and even if he could, there would be few jobs to show for it until (maybe) 2011. Nor can he rewrite the history of his administration. Its signal accomplishments to date are an initial stimulus package that was overrun by the calamity at hand and a marathon health care battle as yet better known for its unseemly orgy of backroom wrangling than its concrete results. While that brawl raged, the White House seemed indifferent to the mounting number of Americans being tossed onto the Great Recession scrapheap.

What utter crap.

Obama should follow in FDR's footsteps

The Depression-era president put 3.4 million people to work with his Works Progress Administration. Such aggressive stimulus could help us out of our current rut.

<...>

Indeed, Obama's experience so far resembles FDR's first uneven stabs at job creation. Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination in 1932 touting a plan to put a million men to work in national parks and forests. When he took office, with the unemployment rate at 24.9%, he created the Civilian Conservation Corps, his first jobs program.

But it was too limited to make much of a dent in joblessness. Estimates of the number of people out of work ranged as high as 15 million. The "CCC boys," as the young men who worked out of military-style camps doing erosion control and reforestation work were known, never numbered more than 300,000 at any given time.

Roosevelt continued his efforts with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The agency's first charge was to feed the hungry and see that they had clothes and shelter, and in tackling that mission, it put 2 million people to work by the fall of 1933 as well.

These efforts still left far too many people out of jobs. As winter approached, relief administrator Harry Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to create a temporary jobs program that would give the private economy a few more months to pick up steam. The Civil Works Administration put more than 4 million workers into jobs during the winter of 1933-34. They mostly repaired roads, parks and public buildings, but there were jobs for teachers and other white-collar workers too.

<...>

But despite his vocal opponents, in January 1935, FDR announced his intention to launch the massive jobs program that became the Works Progress Administration.

more

[flpoljunkie]

3. Wish it were crap, but it is sadly true. Rich hopes Obama can, as we all do.

Selecting Elizabeth Warren as head of CFPB would not only rally the dispirited base, but send a message that Obama is indeed working fur us, and not Wall Street.

[ClarkUSA]

4. You think Obama is working for Wall Street??? That's odd, given Wall Street's antipathy towards him.

In June, the Business Roundtable chairman and Verizon chief executive Ivan Seidenberg gave a speech so rank with self-victimization — he claimed that government was “reaching into virtually every sector of economic life” — that the normally polite Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein reviled him as “a corporate hack” peddling “much-discredited country-club nonsense.”

Seidenberg was soon topped by a multibillionaire Republican contributor, Stephen Schwarzman, who likened Obama’s modest financial regulatory package to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/opinion/12rich.html

Here's more evidence refuting this false meme: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/ClarkUSA/21

ProSense is right. It's crap to distort the Obama administration's record. So is pushing false memes.

[Hawkowl]

20. Co-dependency

He obviously IS cozying up to Wall Street while trying to apply a veneer of reform. In doing so he has earned the wrath of both Wall Street and main street. Anything less than carte blanche for Wall Street and he becomes their mortal enemy. It is all part of the bullshit of the "third way", "pragmatism", "compromise" approach that has failed.

[ClarkUSA]

23. "He obviously IS cozying up to Wall Street" That's a false meme I just refuted. nt

[Hawkowl]

25. You didn't refute Jack. nt

[ClarkUSA]

26. Oh, I certainly did. But you can't prove Jack. nt

[ProSense]

5. "Selecting Elizabeth Warren as head of CFPB would not only rally the dispirited base"

That has nothing to do with job creation or stimulus. I agree that appointing Warren would excite the base, but what does that have to do with stimulating the economy.

As for this statement from the op-ed: "As many have noted, the obvious political model for Obama this year is Franklin Roosevelt, who at his legendary 1936 Madison Square Garden rally..."

October 31, 1936, a few days before the 1936 Presidential election, was a lot different from today. Not only was FDR working with 69 Democratic Senators, the Republican Party was very different. The legislative gains were supported by a significant number of the Republican minority. No doubt the gains in 1934 were a signal to Republicans who stood in opposition.

Rich ends his piece:

F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.

You can bet Republicans aren't confused about which side he's on.

[flpoljunkie]

7. Rich is also taking about getting Democrats enthused enough to come out and vote in November.

[ProSense]

9. Also, this is really curious

In a second forceful speech last week, delivered outside Cleveland, Obama titillated the political press by calling out Boehner by name eight times. But though Boehner is a nice soft target — he belittled the economic meltdown as an “ant” and has staked his political capital on extending tax cuts for America’s wealthiest 3 percent — he’s merely a front-man. Obama must also call out the powerful interests who are pulling the G.O.P.’s strings (and filling its coffers), whether on Wall Street or in Big Oil or any other sector where special interests are aligned against reform in the public interest.

Is he kidding? Boehner is the perfect target. Rich is also pretending that the President has never called out Wall Street or Big oil.

[flpoljunkie]

11. Rich not only one who thinks elevating Boehner is a mistake. Obama is seen by many people, Democrats

included, to prefer Wall Street over Main Street, and they feel he has not done enough to help Main Street. Many agree his foreclosure programs have failed to help enough people facing foreclosure.

Am not sure it helps to single Boehner out since most people don't know who he is--or obviously, even that he's a Republican.

[flpoljunkie]

6. Wall Street didn't get everything they wanted so they are unhappy with Obama. Agree with Rich here.

(The fact is that many people believe Obama has favored Wall Street over Main Street--whether we like it or, or whether it is completely justified. There is nothing in Rich's article with which I do not agree and I dearly hope Obama reads it and heeds his advice.)

Obama has perhaps never recovered from handing his administration’s plum economic jobs to Robert Rubin protégés with dirty hands from the bubble — Lawrence Summers, a deregulation advocate from the Clinton administration, and Timothy Geithner, an indulgent regulator at the New York Fed. Their presence has helped Obama’s more unscrupulous adversaries get away with the lie that his White House, not President Bush’s, created TARP. Indeed, such is the Obama administration’s identification with the tarnished Wall Street culture that even Michael Bloomberg mistakenly identified Geithner, a longtime public servant who never worked at an investment bank, as a Goldman Sachs alumnus at a public event in New York last month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/opinion/12rich.html?ref=frankrich

[ProSense]

8. Here's is why I don't agree with this

"Obama has perhaps never recovered from handing his administration’s plum economic jobs to Robert Rubin protégés with dirty hands from the bubble — Lawrence Summers, a deregulation advocate from the Clinton administration, and Timothy Geithner, an indulgent regulator at the New York Fed. Their presence has helped Obama’s more unscrupulous adversaries get away with the lie that his White House, not President Bush’s, created TARP..."

Republicans don't give a damn about Summers and Geithner. All Republicans are using to base their claim that Obama created the TARP is the fact that his time in office coincided with managing it.

[flpoljunkie]

12. Sadly, Rich is right on here. I could not agree more with his analysis.

They favor Wall Street over Main Street.

[JamesA1102]

10. Well said ProSense

Why anyone would trust Frank Rich after all the lies he told about Al Gore in 2000 is beyond me.

[flpoljunkie]

13. It's not a matter of trusting Rich here. Sadly, his column is spot on.

Rich would like to see Obama do well, as we all would.

[JamesA1102]

14. Yes it is a matter of trusting Rich

The man has no credibilty and as the ProSense showed this column was not "spot on" but filled with inaccuracies.

[flpoljunkie]

16. You may not like hearing what Rich said, but he's right. He wants Obama to succeed, and so do I.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

18. So, for many months, we on the "Professional Left" have been whining and bitching about Obama

not appointing Elizabeth Warren. Now that it looks as though we are finally get our wish, it's still not good enough.

Geez Louize!!!

With friends like us, Obama doesn't need the Wingnut Brigade. We do their jobs for them!

[flpoljunkie]

22. I do think if and when Obama appoints Warren, it will definitely rally the base.

I wonder what he's waiting for.

[JamesA1102]

19. Well you make like hearing Rich's distortions

but I'd rather hear facts. ProSense showed that Rich was distorting the record. Why are you defending Rich's lies?

[flpoljunkie]

21. Because they are not lies. Denial of what we potentially face will not help us in November.

[JamesA1102]

24. ProSense proved that they were NT

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

17. Once again, the voice of reason!!! +1!!! n/t