Circumstances

Many of us are now passing judgment on Barack Obama’s presidency. I admit to being one of them. But maybe we should back off a little before rendering what may be a premature verdict. It’s worth considering that the biggest problem facing him at inauguration was “the Great Recession.” (This happens to be the title of a letter I wrote months before the phrase became part of our vernacular. It was written in reaction to a silly TV debate over whether we were then even in a common garden variety recession.)

The Great Recession is to a lesser degree, at this point at least, similar to what FDR faced on March 4, 1933. As our first president of color Obama has the handicap of being constrained from the sort of invective used by a president of patrician Dutch heritage who said of “money changers” that “I welcome their hatred”  

But well beyond that, Obama has been the victim of less fortuitous timing. FDR was elected in 1932, three years after “Black Thursday” which heralded what became publicly accepted as Hoover’s depression. It took him seven years and a World War to bring about recovery.  

Obama was elected and inaugurated two and four months respectively after the first public knowledge of a financial disaster that was every bit as much George Bush’s as the Great Depression was Hoover’s. But because it has now consumed nearly two years of his presidency, his opponents have been able to spin it to their advantage to a gullible and sizable segment of the electorate.

We are being told by pundits that our problem now is jobs, more specifically the absence of them, AKA unemployment. No kidding! What do they think was the issue in the 1930s? Health care wasn’t of much concern then and there was clearly no need to mention Wall Street reform. The fear that FDR told us not to fear, reduced to essentials, was fear of unemployment.  

At this point Barack Obama is considered by many a failure for his inability to accomplish in two years something that took FDR, generally considered one of our greatest presidents, seven. Go figure.