I basically agree with EJ Dionne’s initial point that we’re getting too obsessed with specifics in this race. Indeed, that’s what my column this morning is all about. But Dionne’s larger argument about how McCain is Hoover and Obama is FDR is rich in ironies. First of all, he has a bit of a point, though it’s unintentional. Neither Hoover nor FDR knew how to deal with the crash and the Depression that followed. But Dionne also writes:
In recent days, Obama has painted himself as calm, pragmatic, open and hopeful. He seemed to be channeling FDR when he told a crowd in Indianapolis on Wednesday: “This isn’t a time for fear or for panic. This is a time for resolve and steady leadership.”
As for McCain, his campaign is trying to sow fear and panic about Obama. That’s exactly what Herbert Hoover tried to do with Roosevelt. Days before the 1932 election, Hoover attacked Roosevelt’s “inchoate New Deal.” He predicted it would “crack the timbers of the Constitution” and warned voters to beware of the “glitter of promise.”
Memo to EJ: Hoover was right about all of that. The New Deal was inchoate. FDR did indisputably crack the timbers of the Constitution and I don’t think Dionne could plausibly argue otherwise. Indeed, how many liberal intellectuals — including Dionne himself — fret that conservatives might bring back the “constitution in exile” (a liberal phrase, not a conservative one by the way) that existed before the New Dealers took their hammers to it.
Let’s leave aside FDR’s assaults on civil liberties, his creation of the imperial presidency and his court packing scheme that intimidated the Supreme Court into rubber-stamping New Deal policies. Instead, let’s just look at his own words. FDR sought to fulfill the Wilsonian dream of replacing the original constitution wth an organic, “living constitution.” In 1944 FDR’s message to Congress read in part:
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
It’s worth noting that Obama expressly and proudly insists that this is his vision of the Constitution.
As for Dionne’s insinuation that Hoover was silly to criticize FDR’s plans as inchoate. Here’s a passage from my book:
Today many liberals subscribe to the myth that the New Deal was a coherent, enlightened, unified endeavor encapsulated in the largely meaningless phrase “the Roosevelt legacy.” This is poppycock. “To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan,” wrote Raymond Moley, FDR’s right-hand man during much of the New Deal, “was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.” When Alvin Hansen, an influential economic adviser to the president, was asked — in 1940! — whether “the basic principle of the New Deal” was “economically sound,” he responded, “I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.”
Anyway, the tragedy is that this election year does look quite a bit like Hoover vs. Roosevelt (and given that choice, I’ll take Hoover) when what we really need is a Coolidge.