A president displeasing left and right

Well-wishers of Obama who seek consolation in the course of FDR's first term are not likely to find much. The most obvious difference is that GDP growth was in double digits from 1933 through 1936, essentially ensuring Roosevelt a second term as long as there was no formidable third-party challenge.  Then too, FDR kicked off his term with a swift, dramatic success that staunched a catastrophe in progress: the bank rescue bill, which ended a panic and brought deposits flooding back into the banks.  For all its many failures, too, the New Deal by 1936 had quite visibly put millions of people back to work and very visibly built out the country's infrastructure. Finally, because the economy had bottomed out by the time FDR took office and growth had been strong in 1933-34, the Democrats won overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate in 1934, empowering a wave of landmark legislation, including the Social Security Act, signed in August 1935.

Perhaps the whole difference is here (large size here):

Nonetheless...the curve of economic freefall staunched and a raft of social welfare legislation passed while the President tacked back and forth between bold action and pulls back on the reins does lend an outline of faint resemblance to the two first terms.  The history rhymes a bit -- and Michael Hiltzik, who just published his The New Deal: A Modern History this September, has got to be conscious of that. Hence the occasional eye-rubbing passage such as this, surveying FDR's political standing in January 1936:

Can Occupy Wall Street make Obama welcome some hatred?

My wife and I went into Times Square for the Occupy Wall Street rally held there Saturday evening.  One of the lead chants was "Wall Street got bailed out; we got sold out." That's a half truth -- and a vague charge, as it leaves the nefarious deeds in the passive voice. Obama thus avoids the direct hit. But not everywhere:

Although that sign is more false than true, I'm glad it's out there. Obama did need to complete the bank bailout and engineer their recapitalization, but he did it with far too few strings attached, and without demanding reciprocal action from the banks in the form of mortgage relief.  I want him pressured from the left -- as FDR was pressured.

Today people love to quote Roosevelt's October 31,1936 campaign speech in which he laid into powerful moneyed interests, who had been excoriating him for instituting a tax on a tax on undistributed corporate profits. Roosevelt responded by campaigning with increasing fervor, according to David M. Kennedy in Freedom from Fear, against "greed" and "autocracy." The Madison Square Garden speech was the climax:

Thomas Friedman at his Thomas Friedmanest*

Confirmation bias, thy name is Thomas Friedman.

Leave it to Friedman to decide, as the U.S. struggles out of the steepest recession in 70 years, that our troubles are due to the moral failings of baby boomers, set off by a cartoonish Goofus/Gallant contrast with the Greatest Generation.  His column putting this moralizing mush across is so jaw-droppingly sloppy that it seems self indulgent to try to debunk it.

First, Friedman uncritically retails Robert Samuelson's recent claim that poor U.S. student performance can be ascribed to poor student motivation --and conveniently ignores Samuelson's main explanation:

The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson. “Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a ‘good’ college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong, he said. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ”

Never mind that the percentages cited do not exactly suggest absenteeism and apathy to be epidemic: Samuelson acknowledges (while underplaying) that the chief cause of stagnant test scores is a wider pool of graduates:

The reality is that, as high schools have become more inclusive (in 1950, 40 percent of 17-year-olds had dropped out compared with about 25 percent today) and adolescent culture has strengthened, the authority of teachers and schools has eroded.

Samuelson's stats don't fully capture the extent to which full access to a high school education was broadened in the postwar era.  According to Stephen J. Rose's Rebound, in 1960 (the baseline for Samuelson's snapshot of U.S. high school students' educational achievement over time), only half of workers had a high school diploma, almost 30% had some college, and 10% had a college degree. Today, Rose writes, "these numbers are completely reversed": only 10% lack a high school diploma, 60%  have some postsecondary education, and 30% have at least a 4-year college degree.

Hillary: Don't Tread on Me

I wonder if Hillary is not playing in some sense on people's widespread love to hate her. Watching her tear into Obama, I found myself very disturbed but also thinking that not too many people on earth would want to mess with her. Not to get into tailoring gender-based epithets, I wonder if some won't feel toward Hillary something like what FDR said about the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza: he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch....

Perhaps, too, in weighing the pros and cons of attacking Obama without any too-tender regard for scrupulous accuracy, the Clinton team decided to send a message to Republicans: don't tread on me. The old egg fry: this is your candidate on Hillary.