…or Herbert Hoover?
As President Obama struggles, again, to gain control of the economic conversation and relaunch his administration’s economic policy (how many times has this administration announced its determination to focus on job creation?) the similarities between these two idealistic and patriotic men begin to emerge. In both cases we have a President who thought that his mission was to remake the world, but who gradually discovered that the tools in his toolkit were no match for the problems he faced. With great intelligence and serious goodwill, both men set about to address the most important issues facing the country and the world — only to find that their chosen remedies failed one by one.
I am not convinced that the President’s political goose is cooked — yet. For one thing, luck can never be discounted. Recessions don’t last forever, anymore than booms do, and American capitalism is strong enough to stage a recovery in the face of poor policy. But luck aside, the President can still avoid the great mistake that finally wrecked Hoover: the failure to learn.
President Hoover brought some convictions with him to office about how the economy worked, how government worked, and what his role as President should be. As the Depression deepened, he did the best he could within those limits, but nothing seems to have made him reconsider the mix of progressive ideas that he brought with him to the White House. As months of failure and disappointment grew into years, he doesn’t seem to have questioned those core ideas or to think about ways in which the economic emergency might require steps that in normal times would not be taken. He not only failed to end the Depression; he failed to give people a sense that he understood what was happening. Over-optimistic forecasts issued in part to build confidence came back to haunt him. To the public he seemed fuddled and doctrinaire, endlessly recycling stale platitudes in the face of radically new economic problems.
One of the myths of the rewritten history by the left is that Hoover was a conservative, with laissez-faire economic policies (and thus by implication a hero of modern Republicans, particularly Reagan Republicans), but he was an economically ignorant progressive of his time, albeit a good engineer and a good man. The comparison seems quite apt to me (except I’m sure that Hoover was nowhere near as arrogant, narcissistic and self absorbed as the president).
They did that with the more recent Bush administration: Eight years of free markets run amok, mass deregulation, and tax cuts for the rich.
Of course, that’s a completely false meme, but it’s shocking how many people accept it.
I was saying his middle initial really stands for “Hoover,” last year — if not the year before.
I’d say he’s Jimmy Carter on foreign policy, Herbert Hoover on economic policy.
People here may be interested in Jonathan Yardley’s Engineer of his own defeat: Jimmy Carter’s “White House Diary”.
Carter and Hoover were both engineers — narrow and rigid in their thinking. That can be helpful in, for example, building a transcontinental railroad, but is very problematic in dealings with people in all their wide variations. Quite a few failures at NASA can be attributed to the same way of thinking.
“With great intelligence and serious goodwill, both men”
I can’t speak to Hoover, but that definitely doesn’t describe Bambi.
(Although is does describe what his acolytes want everyone to think about him.)
Obama is Hoover – not this one, but this one.
I dunno, Alan — that Hoover only sucks when it’s working as intended.
[…]
Ohhhh-h-h-h. I gotcha.
I think the comparison is unfair to Carter and Hoover. Hoover really did want to end the Depression, and, furthermore, he really had been successful at a number of large-scale top-down ventures, such as flood relief in the south in the 30s and the food relief in Europe after the First World War, so he had objective reasons to think his methods would succeed. (And at that, I think the case that they would not have is far from clear: perhaps if Hoover had been re-elected, the Depression would have ended in 1933-34-35, and not dragged on for another 5, 6 or 7 years.)
Not only has Obama never piloted any large-scale venture to success, I don’t think he actually wants to end the recession per se. He just wants its ill effects on rascally non-college-degreed male rednecks to be considered “bumps on the road” to his ultimate high-speed green-jobs single-payer future, in which he is our Dear Leader and we are all his adoring students, just like it was in his University of Chicago seminars.
Carter, too, was sincere in a way Obama is not. He really is a moralizer, and he ran the Presidency in just that way, for better or worse. I do not recall much in the way during the Carter Administraiton of the grotesque cynicism and hypocrisy that infects the Obama Administration. (His strange undermining of US foreign policy as unfair to dictators seems to post-date his Presidency, and I wonder if it’s a legacy of the bitterness he probably felt over having his worldview soundly rejected by voters in favor of Reagan’s. In office he was not as sympathetic to thugs, except for the Palestinians, and in that he was hardly alone.)
I think the best modern comparison to Obama is FDR, who was also a deeply cynical opportunist and narcissist elitist who thought himself rathah bettah than the rest of us. But FDR rode to repeated victory on substantially changing immigrant demographics, a well-timed European war, and an excellent control of information. Obama hoped for the former, but it may not materialize, and the latter are (fortunately) out of his control.
Where he can (and I expect will) emulate FDR is in having Camelot-gloss applied to him retrospectively, after he leaves office. In the next century he will regularly top lists of the Best Presidents, assembled by pundits and scholars, and what he tried to accomplish (since he won’t have actually accomplished anything at all) will be glowingly portrayed to schoolchildren in just the way Kennedy’s aspirations are. If, as seems increasingly possible, he is rejected in 2012, he will be portrayed as a martyr to resurgent nativism and economic anxiety, a leader ahead of his time. It will be a hundred years before he is honestly evaluated as the James Buchanan of his day.
Do not put Obama in the same category as Hoover and Carter. Hoover and Carter were both engineers by training and background and, thus, knew something. Obama is not.
I think he’s the new benchmark.
Sometimes I think He aspires to be James Buchanan– the guy whose inaction aided and abetted the Democrats in starting a war and almost destroy this country because they lost an election.
In the next century he will regularly top lists of the Best Presidents, assembled by pundits and scholars
If the Stupid Party had any smarts, they’d be running against Barack H. Obama in every election for the next few decades the way the Dems still get away with running against Herbert Hoover.
kurt9,
Obama knows things as well — just not the same things that Hoover and Carter did. Obama is not an engineer. He’s a lawyer. Lawyers know things as well. Have you ever been the friend of a lawyer? I have — both Republican and Democratic. The ones I know are bright, thoughtful and knowledgeable about many things. Their political views are also rather varied.
As the InstaPundit puts it, “Jimmy Carter is a best case scenario.”
I like this haiku from online:
Obama failed
The worst President ever
Jimmy Carter grins!
It will be a hundred years before he is honestly evaluated as the James Buchanan of his day.
This seems rather like an insult to James Buchanan, who before he was the second-worst president to ever defile the office, was a solid Doughface apparachnik with decades of bureaucratic experience in two generations of Jacksonian Democratic governance. By all accounts he was a fine Minister to Russia, for instance. He just had the ill luck to preside over a political Black Swan of a demolition derby, or else he would be remembered as no better or worse than Polk, Pierce, or von Buren, and rather better than Tyler and Fillmore.
Andrew Johnson, btw, gets my vote for the worst American president; he just happened to enjoy a more forgiving political environment than Buchanan, and he still got himself impeached, if not convicted.
I don’t agree with your conclusions, Mitch. In the first place, just as Buchanan was a perfectly serviceable public-service drone, so Obama would have made a perfectly serviceable junior Senator from the great state of Illinois. He doesn’t seem worse than Dick Durbin or Carol Mosely-Braun. So as much as Buchanan, Obama personifies the Peter Principle.
Secondly, both Tyler and Fillmore strike me as competent, if not inspiring Presidents, who were to some extent the victims of struggles between power centers in Congress. It is to be remembered this is long before the Imperial Presidency. Pierce is a nobody, yes, but Polk is generally considered quite an effective President. Van Buren I can kind of give you, since he, too, rose higher than his level of competency. He was kind of the George Bush Senior of his day, ha ha, following Jackson as the later followed Reagan.
I don’t argue with you that Johnson was a bad President, but I don’t think his potlical environment was at all forgiving. It would have taken a Lincoln to successfully preside over Reconstuction and the violently conflicting wishes of copperheads and Radical Republicans. I think for a truly misunderstood and misunderestimated President of the 19th century, who was a victim of circumstances, you should look at Grant.