UNACCUSTOMED AS WE ARE TO DEFENDING FDR... (via Ed Driscoll)

Barack Hoover Obama (Ken Silverstein, Harper's)

Kevin Baker has an excellent piece in the July issue of the magazine (available to subscribers) about the similarities between our current president and our thirty-first, Herbert Hoover:

The comparison is not meant to be flippant. It has nothing to do with the received image of Hoover, the dour, round-collared, gerbil-cheeked technocrat who looked on with indifference while the country went to pieces. To understand how dire our situation is now it is necessary to remember that when he was elected president in 1928, Herbert Hoover was widely considered the most capable public figure in the country. Hoover—like Obama—was almost certainly someone gifted with more intelligence, a better education, and a greater range of life experience than FDR.

Mr. Roosevelt attended Groton, Harvard and Columbia Law, though he passed the NY Bar Exam without completing the last (back when it was used to exclude idiots). He was de facto Secretary of the Navy during WWI, in a time when navies still mattered. And he was governor of New York. Though Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously characterized him as having a "second-rate intellect but a first-class temperament," FDR obviously had precisely the sort of experience to qualify one for the presidency.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 20, 2009 12:21 PM