On the rocks Obama: Fatalism between the lines.
By Christopher P. Winner
Published: 2010-06-29 T he first term lives of Democratic presidents do not come with guardian angels. Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton gave more than they got. Even "Yes We Can" has his hands full. FDR faced dire circumstances. If a bad recession is a shark, depression is a piranha. Roosevelt created jobs at government expense, some useful, other frivolous. That didn't stop American Liberty League Democrats and big business from labeling him a socialist and blaming New Deal rescue missions for betraying the right to "earn, save and acquire property." Talk radio's Father Charles Coughlin went further: The New Deal was "a stinking cesspool of pagan autocracy." Roosevelt was also lucky to be alive. A Calabria-born Italian immigrant named Giuseppe Zangara shot at him in Miami in 1933. The mayor of Chicago and four others were killed. Zangara was convicted and executed. FDR's decision to slash military spending also made enemies. Generals, journalists and intellectuals looked warily at the rise of Nazi Germany and expansionist Japan. In fact, FDR's first term salvation came less from depression-busting than from winning over union rank-and-file, which rewarded right-to-strike and collective bargaining legislation with the votes necessary to guarantee a 1936 landslide.  Carter in 1980: He aged a decade in four years.
John Kennedy's shattered term was edgy. If grief followed his 1963 assassination, love hadn't preceded it. Though solving the Cuban Missile Crisis helped offset the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy was nonetheless pilloried for inconsistancy. He still carried an elitist family burden, compounded by Harvard. He spoke loudly but tread gingerly on civil rights to avoid alienating southern Democrats who formed a key wing of the party — it was Kennedy's Texas successor Lyndon Johnson, a well-connected congressional insider, who made good on earlier pledges. Kennedy also faced muckraking resistance from J. Edgar Hoover's potent FBI. Hoover privately derided Kennedy and his attorney general brother as in-over-their-heads egghead liberals lacking toughness. Gen. James McChrystal's recently published criticism of President Barack Obama and his staff pales in comparison. For some Washington insiders, Kennedy was both too slick and too young. At a time when 50 was considered the first eligible decade for leadership, he'd yet to turn 45. Kennedy's slap-down of U.S. Steel — he forced the company to rescind price hikes, calling them inflationary — elicited vituperative language from the usually cautious Wall Street Journal: He succeeded "by naked power, by threats, by agents of the state security police." The Communist inference was clear. Kennedy's Gallup Poll approval rating, a sky-high 83 percent in March 1962, stood at 56 percent a month before his murder. By comparison, Obama's rating is now 45 percent, down 18 points in 18 months. It's a territorial hazard. But Jimmy Carter's four years of dangerous living remain an object lesson in the muscle of mood shifts. Elected to erase the sullying Nixon legacy, the grinning Georgia governor encountered fierce resistance in Congress, which saw him as a rank outsider — he had succeeded a consummate insider, former House speaker Gerald Ford. |
AREA 51Christopher P. Winner Christopher P. Winner is editor and publisher of The American. His column appears weekly. Dante's windsAn appetite for calamity has turned hurricanes into celebrity superstars. Marcel AlbertTea Party aside, European dreams still often involve the American one.  Three-legged dogBeware August, which can transform the incidental into the groundbreaking. WoefulIf a recession is a form of anxiety, part of the cure is not surrendering to it. HerrWhen Proactive gets mad at Many, Multiple does the dirty work. More Area 51 |
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September 7, 2010 | Rome, Italy | Partly Cloudy, 25°C
