BARACK, MEET FRANKLIN...AND LET HIM SMOKE – AT 9:29 A.M. ET:  Historian Arthur Herman recommends that Barack Obama introduce himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt, a president of some note, who actually believed in winning a war.

The White House specifically said the speech was modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats during the Great Depression and World War II. At its climax, Obama even referenced America’s creation of the so-called Arsenal of Democracy as an example of how Americans can seize their destiny and achieve greatness.

He’s right, but Obama may regret picking that example...

...FDR built that arsenal of democracy by working with business, not fighting against it—let alone by keeping a boot on its neck. If Roosevelt had been speaking from the Oval Office last Tuesday, he would have announcing the creation of a presidential panel of oil executives and engineers to help BP solve the oil spill, rather than a scheme to strip BP of its profits.

This is because, in the year and a half before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt realized that the best way to mobilize a country like ours for a great task is to unleash the productivity and ingenuity of American industrial enterprise. His decision outraged some of his closest advisors and allies. It flew in the face of his own progressive instincts. But it not only helped to win World War II, it pulled the United States out of the Great Depression, and it has provided a useful model of how government needs to partner with the private sector, ever since.

Tell that to the sixties crowd, now running things, with their Ivy League diplomas on the wall.  Remember when the Ivy League actually believed in America?

Faced in the summer of 1940 with the inevitability of war in Europe drawing in the United States, Roosevelt also faced a choice. Diehard New Dealers like his wife, Eleanor, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes wanted to use war mobilization to permanently extend the reach and power of federal government. By nationalizing some industries, limiting the profits of others and ordering a halt to civilian production in still others, their goal was to re-engineer the private-enterprise economy into a Washington-controlled economy. Having missed their chance with the National Recovery Administration to pound Big Business into submission, the New Deal Left and their Big Labor allies, weren’t about to let this crisis go to waste.

But FDR—under the influence of conservative Democrats like Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones and the new Republican members of his administration such as Secretary of War Henry Stimson and William Knudsen, the former GM president who became head of the Office of Production Management in the fall of 1940—chose a different course. In the year before Pearl Harbor, they convinced him that the best way to get the country ready for the coming war was not to fight the profit motive of private companies and corporations, but to unleash it.

Strange – it worked.  But Roosevelt had more savvy in his little finger than Obama has in his whole brain, and he took the idea of victory seriously.  Obama won't utter the word. 

Roosevelt was elected four times.   Once will be enough for The One.  Or The Former One.

June 20, 2010