Speaking of presidential history … Jonathan Alter compares Bush to FDR, and I thought this section particularly interesting —
Like Bush, FDR took an expansive view of presidential power. But he didn’t circumvent Congress, as Bush did on warrantless wire-tapping. On March 5, 1933, his first full day in office, Roosevelt toyed with giving a speech to the American Legion in which he essentially created a Mussolini-style private army to guard banks against violence. One draft had Roosevelt telling middle-age veterans, long since returned to private life, that “I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation that now confronts us.”
When I saw this document in the Roosevelt Library, my eyes nearly popped out. This was dictator talk—a power grab. But FDR didn’t give that speech. Although establishment figures like the columnist Walter Lippmann urged Roosevelt to become a dictator (Mussolini was highly popular in the U.S. and the word, amazingly enough, had a positive connotation at the time), the new president decided to run everything past Congress—even the arrogant and ill-fated effort to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937.
We are not facing a greater threat from foreign enemies now than the nation did then. Bush’s secrecy has a lot less to do with national security than with keeping his ass covered.
Roosevelt wasn’t big on excuse-making. Shortly after assuming office, he said he wanted a quarter of a million unemployed young “hobos” working in the forests by summer. Every cabinet member said it couldn’t be done. But because he understood the levers of power (partly from his experience in the Wilson administration, bureaucratic training that Bush lacks), he made it happen and the Civilian Conservation Corps changed the face of the country.
Had such competent leadership been present after 9/11, it’s a fair bet that it would not have taken more than four years for the FBI to fix its computers and for the government to secure ports and chemical plants against terrorism. FDR would have demanded it be done in, say, four months.
“He made it happen.” That’s what leaders do. They make stuff happen. They don’t make speeches and then retreat to the ranch and kinda hope it all works out somehow.
Where Bush has until now placed loyalty over performance, FDR put performance over loyalty. If aides didn’t do the job or keep him fully informed, he would freeze them out, even if—like Louis Howe (Roosevelt’s Rove), Ray Moley and Jim Farley—they had served him for years. And where Bush has often seen the war on terror as a chance for partisan advantage, FDR viewed World War II as a time to reach across party lines. He appointed Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state, Henry Stimson, his secretary of war, and the 1936 GOP candidate for vice president, Frank Knox, his navy secretary. He even brought his 1940 Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, into the fold.
Bush is not much of a believer in accountability; FDR knew it could make him a more effective president. He held two press conferences a week and instead of shunning Congress’s oversight of Halliburton-style profiteering during the war, he put the main critic, Sen. Harry Truman, on the 1944 ticket.
Bush, on the other hand, doesn’t like to acknowledge that the Democratic Party exists. In fact, he can barely work with people in his own party, preferring to just dictate what he wants them to do.
Other differences — where Bush is stubbornly inflexible and seems to think a mind closed to change is a virtue, FDR “was so flexible that many Democrats tried to stop him from gaining the 1932 presidential nomination because they saw him as a straddler and flip-flopper on issues like the League of Nations and Prohibition. (Neither ‘wet’ nor ‘dry,’ he was a ‘damp.’)” Alter writes.
FDR sent Eleanor and others around the country so they could give him firsthand accounts of New Deal programs, so he could fix them. Bush seems to take no interest whatsoever in signature policies such as No Child Left Behind or Medicare drug benefits. Once a policy is shoved through Congress Bush washes his hands of it and expects the little people to somehow make it work.
FDR’s speeches helped unify the nation and calm peoples’ fear. Bush prefers to polarize the nation and stoke fear. This takes me to one other difference not mentioned in the Alter piece — especially through his fireside chats, FDR explained to the nation why he adopted his policies and how he expected them to work. You can listen to some of them here. Bush, on the other hand, doesn’t like to explain anything. He makes pie-in-the-sky pronouncements about “freedom,” or he has hissy fits and declares “I’m the decider,” but he rarely explains the steps he intends to take to reach a goal.
Here’s the most recent Bush radio address. It’s partly about military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, so you might compare it to this radio address given by FDR on July 48, 1943, on the war in Italy. Or since Bush also talked about job development, you might want to compare it to this talk from April 28, 1935, on FDR’s work relief program. Or just pick any FDR talk at random. I’m not going to point out how the talks differ; you’ll see it when you read them. Just read one, and then the other, and weep.
