STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Obama Channels a Wartime FDR?
By Staff News & Analysis - October 25, 2011

Obama's Re-Election Model Is FDR … With the economy sinking in 1937, Roosevelt accused business of sabotage. President Obama is cozying up to the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, intending to make resentment of big business a central theme of his re-election campaign. Here he's following the lead of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who tried to convince the public that Wall Street was to blame for the double-dip recession that plagued his second administration. – Wall Street Journal

Dominant Social Theme: Just like FDR, President Barack Obama has "saved the day" for millions of Americans with his combination of with, empathy and political savvy.

Free-Market Analysis: We have long noted that a strategy of the US Democrats is to create a comparison between President Barack Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is a cynical ploy and actually runs much deeper than surface comparisons.

Paul Moreno, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, has written an interesting article about this comparison (see excerpt above). From Moreno's perspective, Obama is simply taking a page from FDR's playbook, potentially. But we tend to think its more complicated than that. It is also potentially quite dangerous.

Moreno foresees Obama attacking business and even the private market system in order to ensure that the blame for the Greater Recession does not end up on his shoulders during an election. While some would say it's already too late, the American electorate does not have a long memory and there is probably still plenty of time for Obama to change the narrative.

There is something else about Obama's potential adoption of FDR's persona that is troubling. He seems entirely inauthentic. A man who has given up his identity to the demand of higher office is likely to do ANYTHING to retain power, both for himself and his handlers. This has given rise to an entire cottage industry of Obama doubters, most recently joined by Texas governor Rick Perryl; he recently stated skepticism over Obama's recently produced birth certificate (along with millions of others).

But the doubts about Obama go far deeper than questions about where he was born. Most of his background is hidden and unavailable to journalists and other researchers. He has concealed his records literally from nursery school on up.

Why the secrecy? Well … we would argue there's considerable evidence for anyone who wants to do some digging on the Internet that Obama is indeed a kind of manufactured president. America's great Intel shops seem to have had a lot to do with Obama's background and eventual ascent to the top US political job. There is evidence as well that one or both of his parents were connected to American intelligence, specifically the CIA.

Within this larger context, Obama's role as the "new" FDR makes sense. Many of the dominant social themes of the Anglosphere power elite seem to repeat like a kind of discordant melody. Those who analyze this elite closely believe that the reason for the repetition is that the powers-that-be are reapplying what worked most effectively.

The eventual goal is one-world government, and Obama's presidency is supposed to aid in that realization. If one accepts that central banking economies are bound to fail, then Obama's positioning as FDR is a logical extension of his current persona. Here's some more from the article:

American students are all familiar with the "Red Scare" that followed World War I, and even more with the one led by Joseph McCarthy in the early years of the Cold War. But they almost never hear of the "Brown Scare" of the 1930s, when liberals painted political opponents as incipient fascists. FDR told former speechwriter Rex Tugwell late in 1937 that he "wanted to scare these people into doing something."

It was an odd strategy, trying to vilify business into creating jobs. And it didn't work well. While his lieutenants were trying to depict American industrialists as brownshirts, Roosevelt's 1937 efforts to "pack" the Supreme Court and to purge conservatives in the 1938 Democratic primaries made him look like the real threat to democracy. In March of that year he felt compelled to tell the press that he had "no inclination to be a dictator." Nevertheless, the Republicans recovered from near-extinction in the midterm and the New Deal came to a halt.

President Obama is perfectly capable of resorting to antibusiness demagoguery. In his 2010 State of the Union he berated the Supreme Court for allegedly reversing "a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities."

And in one of his speeches last summer on debt reduction, the president singled out "corporate jet owners and oil companies" for allegedly unfair tax breaks, and he asked "how can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries?" We may hear more, much more in coming months, if the economy continues to flounder.

The Obama-as-FDR-meme is an especially pernicious one in our view because it likely opens up a Pandora's Box of anti-freedom ramifications. Anyone who believes in free-markets and who studies what FDR really tried to do will likely come away horrified. Thus, we would have to believe that Obama's positioning is not merely a PR stunt. It is designed to help him win re-election and will involve legislation as well as speeches.

There have been hints of FDR-oriented positioning in the past. But Obama's handlers seem to be getting more serious about it now. This does not bode well for the rest of his first term. it is likely even more troubling from the standpoint of a potential second term. The FDR-initiative seemingly opens the door for any kind of mischief.

We fully expect to see President Obama step up his attacks on the business community. Even more troubling is the idea that FDR used war as a political weapon. One could argue that this is where Obama is headed. While posing as the "peace president," Obama is actually involved in the formulation and perpetuation of a Greater War. (See other article, this issue.)

The Greater Recession and the chaos that follows it is to be ameliorated by an inspirational national leader. It doesn't much matter whether Obama IS this sort of leader. He will be made to look that way. And when history regards the Obama presidency it may note that his anti-free-market activities were not by any means his greatest manipulations.

After Thoughts

Our fear would be that current manipulations, as well as those to come, will pale beneath the greatest manipulation of all: A regional or world war designed to pave the way for a strengthened form of global governance. This is the frightening resonance of the FDR comparison and it is one that in our view is deeply disturbing.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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