Boardwalk and Park Place

In current polls the one area in which Mitt Romney leads Barack Obama, and it’s a big one, is his perceived ability to manage the economy. It is this point to which I take issue. It’s been mentioned by many, including me, that no president in our history has taken office with more impressive credentials in finance than Herbert Hoover, or few less impressive than Harry Truman, a failed haberdasher.* This could be coincidental.

So can the disparity in wealth preceding the current Great Recession being greater than at any time since 1929, an inequity that is still growing. Regulations on the financial complex in 2007 were more lax than at any time since 1929. Perhaps this is also coincidental. But if the flip of a coin comes out heads too many times in a row you might think about taking a look at it if you’ve been calling tails.

It should be common knowledge that corporations are expected to show a profit while the United States Government is not. I’m amazed at the number of people of all political persuasions who have forgotten that the purported reason for the controversial Bush tax cuts was that a surplus was a threat to the economy. This pearl of wisdom was spoken by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, theAlan Greenspan, at the time an oracle to the right. In retrospect it’s not hard to see him as a housebroken Ayn Rand.

While there is no precise equivalent to our current dilemma, the Great Depression comes closest. FDR was reelected for his second term by a greater margin than his first**and Obama’s reelection is in danger. In FDR’s case the house had come tumbling down three years before his first term so the Depression was clearly Hoover’s. On one hand Barack Obama’s election was helped considerably by the news that had come into full bloom just two months earlier. On the other, compared to FDR it’s a matter of months to years.  Relative to the obstacles they inherited I see what Obama has accomplished as president on a par with what FDR did in his first term. The timing of the circumstances was quite different for both, and by the way, so are their pedigrees. 

*Truman’s business was successful until a depression hit the farm belt ten years before it hit the nation.

**Maine had been a bell weather state since the Civil War when both the state and nation tended to vote Republican, leading to the saying “as Maine goes so goes the nation.” The laugh line after Alf Landon carried only two states in 1936 was “as Maine goes so goes Vermont.”