Early last summer, long before the term “death panels” became famous, before Joe Lieberman reminded everyone that he is among the most selfish people in the country, before even the horseshit controversy over a stupid arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts tangled up the most powerful man in the world, the sad state in which we presently find ourselves was laid out with architectural precision in Harper’s. The July 2009 cover article buried a presidency that was about four months old, and did so with a damning and eerily accurate comparison to the paragon of ineffectiveness, Herbert Hoover.
Reading it at the time, I thought it was both scary and pessimistic, but I couldn’t come up with a decent counterargument other than, “We’ll have to wait and see.” So I saved it, and every once and a while, when the economic news remained frail, when some decent but horribly underpowered piece of legislation passed or fell just short, when the Obama Administration mumbled some recycled right wing falsehood about deficits, I’d think about it. After the disaster on Tuesday, I finally sat down and read it again, and if there is an award for prescient year and a half old magazine articles, “Barack Hoover Obama: The Best and Brightest Blow It Again” richly deserves to win.
I strongly recommend reading the whole thing, but the basic thrust of it is to point out that Hoover was far from a do nothing president who silently watched as America sank into the worst economic times in modern history. He tried everything his impressive intellect could think of, and broke a lot of new ground in terms of what people thought the government could or should do. His failure wasn’t one of laziness or callousness, it was one of scale:
Neither the RFC nor any of Hoover’s other programs did anything to seriously address the other major problems then plaguing the American economy: the decades-long farm crisis that was sweeping away Dust Bowl farmers’ actual soil along with their holdings; the near annihilation of the labor movement; a wildly unequal distribution of wealth; the lack of any real safety net for the old, the indigent, and the unemployable; a corrupt, non-transparent financial system that remained largely unregulated—in short, the need for systematic, wholesale reform of a nation that had foundered on the changing circumstances of the modern world.
It would have been very difficult to make most of these changes, because by and large they were advocated only by what were then the most radical individuals on the fringes of the political system. The one thing to be said in favor of such changes was that they were absolutely necessary.
It was a little chilling to read that in the summer of 2009, here in the autumn of 2010 it’s outright scary.
America has changed a lot in eighty years, Social Security and Medicare exist, as do at least some forms of relief for the unemployed. The country isn’t undergoing an agricultural shortage, starvation isn’t a widespread problem, and the overall economy is far more diverse. Still, the parallels with the Obama Administration are obvious.
Herbert Hoover’s America was a fundamentally broken place, one where merely tweaking the old system wasn’t enough to fix things. Barack Obama’s America is now indisputably in the same predicament. For all that Obama has done, it hasn’t been nearly enough, and now his opportunity to change the basics is gone for at least two years. The only question now is whether a re-elected Obama in 2012 can be the president the country needs, or whether it’ll have to wait until 2016.
[Edited on 10 November 2010 because I forgot to put the quote in block quote format on Sunday.]
