THEY AREN'T HELPED BY THE FACT THE NEW DEAL FAILED:

Obama, Dems face hard sell on stimulus (DAVID ROGERS, 1/7/09, AP)

Faced with record deficits and a skeptical public, Democrats are doubling up efforts to sell their economic recovery plan, with President-elect Barack Obama taking the lead in a speech Thursday designed to lay out the case for government action. [...]

When FDR took the helm during the Great Depression, the prospect of any government action — even Roosevelt’s bank holiday — was welcomed as a shot in the arm. In Obama’s case, the prospect of action — by itself — may not be enough without him using speeches like the one Thursday to spell out some larger purpose.

FDR did not take power until March 1933, more than three years after the Great Crash of 1929. On the morning of his Inauguration, most of the nation’s banks had shut their doors, and even Wall Street and the Chicago Board of Trade had suspended operations.

Obama comes to power sooner after the downturn, and also after a period of extraordinary intervention already by Treasury and the Federal Reserve. The results of that activity have been mixed. And while most economists agree that the country is better off for having acted, the huge costs have also fed skepticism among the public.

“There’s a sense out there that we keep throwing more and more money at the problem,” pollster Neil Newhouse told Politico. “There’s a ton of skepticism out there whether this will make a difference.”

When liberals still dominated academia and the media, a quarter century ago, the received Schlessingerian wisdom would have been that the New Deal saved capitalism and got us out of the Great Depression. Nowadays, even a fairly standard issue liberal historian like, David M. Kennedy, writing in the thoroughly orthodox Oxford History of the United States series, has no compunction about deconstructing such nonsense.

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Posted by Orrin Judd at January 8, 2009 7:47 AM