Michael Hirsch and Daniel Gross: The Wisdom of Crowds
John Dingell is one of the few people in Washington who remembers the last time so much populist anger gripped the country. It was early 1933, the worst year of the Great Depression. The Michigan congressman, now 83, was a wide-eyed kid listening to his father—also a congressman—speak at the family dinner table about losing his entire net worth of $7,500. "Americans all hated the damn bankers, they hated Wall Street," Dingell tells NEWSWEEK. "We had more communists in this country than there were in the Soviet Union because" of rage against the so-called banksters. No one knew this better than the incoming president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The story is told that a supporter warned FDR that if he failed now, with the nation in chaos, he'd be known as "our worst president," and Roosevelt supposedly replied: "If I fail, I'll be your last president." FDR exhorted his New Dealers, "Above all, try something!" While it took time to get going, the hodgepodge of recovery programs he came up with—some successful, others not—managed to appease most of the populist outrage....
Barack Obama isn't saddled with the same degree of economic disaster as Franklin Roosevelt; the nation suffers 10 percent unemployment, which is bad, but it's not 25 percent. Yet the 44th president may face a political problem almost as sticky. Obama, like FDR, must appease populist anger rising from both left and right. Obama's giant stimulus, his health-care plan, and his continuation of the Bush administration's various bailout programs have ignited a prairie-fire backlash from the right (fueled in part by cynical Beltway Republicans). They call themselves tea partiers. The left's outrage is less organized (it's the left, after all), but reflects a visceral sense that the president has coddled Wall Street and given short shrift to Main Street. "The Democratic base is out of patience here," says a senior labor leader. "We're at a breaking point." There's something deeper at work beyond politics. We've witnessed an epic failure of the establishment—political, financial, business, even cultural.
All of which adds up to a very unhappy moment for Obama. The president and the Ivy Leaguers he has surrounded himself with are not natural populists. Since its appearance on the scene in the late 19th century, the language of populism has been one of opposition and incitement, clashes and fights—the Eastern bankers vs. the Midwestern farmers, rich white urban elites vs. poorer rural whites. That's not the language Obama traffics in. When the cerebral Obama inveighs against "fat-cat bankers," the phrase doesn't trip off his tongue. He's a community organizer, not a rabble-rouser. And he must know that populism, generally speaking, has been the refuge for losers in the American political process. No populist candidate has even come close to the presidency, though Teddy Roosevelt hit the 27 percent mark with his Bull Moose run in 1912 (he'd already been president, after all) and Ross Perot amassed an impressive 19 percent in 1992. William Jennings Bryan, the original Populist candidate, was the Democratic nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908, but received fewer votes in each successive campaign....
Even so, smart presidents don't confront the populists head-on, they defang them by giving them some of what they want. After FDR launched the New Deal—and John Dingell's father helped to write the Glass-Steagall law separating commercial from investment banking—the nation slowly recovered and Roosevelt's personal popularity soared. Populist rabble-rousers like Huey Long on the left and Charles Coughlin on the right lost their resonance (or, in Long's case, were assassinated)....
But Obama is going to need a lot more than his usual rhetorical flourishes in the months ahead. There's a perception, largely accurate, that one set of rules applies to one group of people—generally wealthy and well connected—and another set of rules applies to the rest. And worse, that the many are subsidizing the few, cleaning up the messes they made. In too many areas, there are zero-sum games, in which the private interests of those who have access to the levers of power are arrayed against the interests of the large mass of American citizens. Generally speaking, the people have come out losers: insurance companies against policyholders, borrowers against lenders, and, most recently and explosively, taxpayers against the banks. Regardless of how much of the bailout money comes back, there's no way to spin it other than as a transfer of wealth from public taxpayers to the shareholders, bondholders, and managers of large, poorly run financial institutions....
...Historian Alan Brinkley points out there are "interesting similarities between the trajectory of Roosevelt's presidency and Obama's. Both began with tremendous popularity and hopes and expectations, and by end of the first year of both of their terms there was quite a lot disillusionment." FDR responded with what became known as his "second New Deal"—ramming through an astonishing flurry of legislation that included the creation of Social Security and the Securities and Ex-change Commission and the Wagner Act (giving labor the right to organize and bargain collectively). "Roosevelt went through very much the same kind of uprising of anger in 1934 as Obama is experiencing," says Brinkley, but ultimately FDR managed to "outflank" it. Obama's got a more recalcitrant Congress to deal with, Brinkley notes, but he still has three more years (at least) to recover from a crisis that's far less serious.
If the president can manage to get ahead of the populist sentiment, rather than merely chase it as he's currently doing, he will begin to fulfill the hopes and expectations he raised in his campaign, and which now seem so deflated.
Read entire article at Newsweek
Barack Obama isn't saddled with the same degree of economic disaster as Franklin Roosevelt; the nation suffers 10 percent unemployment, which is bad, but it's not 25 percent. Yet the 44th president may face a political problem almost as sticky. Obama, like FDR, must appease populist anger rising from both left and right. Obama's giant stimulus, his health-care plan, and his continuation of the Bush administration's various bailout programs have ignited a prairie-fire backlash from the right (fueled in part by cynical Beltway Republicans). They call themselves tea partiers. The left's outrage is less organized (it's the left, after all), but reflects a visceral sense that the president has coddled Wall Street and given short shrift to Main Street. "The Democratic base is out of patience here," says a senior labor leader. "We're at a breaking point." There's something deeper at work beyond politics. We've witnessed an epic failure of the establishment—political, financial, business, even cultural.
All of which adds up to a very unhappy moment for Obama. The president and the Ivy Leaguers he has surrounded himself with are not natural populists. Since its appearance on the scene in the late 19th century, the language of populism has been one of opposition and incitement, clashes and fights—the Eastern bankers vs. the Midwestern farmers, rich white urban elites vs. poorer rural whites. That's not the language Obama traffics in. When the cerebral Obama inveighs against "fat-cat bankers," the phrase doesn't trip off his tongue. He's a community organizer, not a rabble-rouser. And he must know that populism, generally speaking, has been the refuge for losers in the American political process. No populist candidate has even come close to the presidency, though Teddy Roosevelt hit the 27 percent mark with his Bull Moose run in 1912 (he'd already been president, after all) and Ross Perot amassed an impressive 19 percent in 1992. William Jennings Bryan, the original Populist candidate, was the Democratic nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908, but received fewer votes in each successive campaign....
Even so, smart presidents don't confront the populists head-on, they defang them by giving them some of what they want. After FDR launched the New Deal—and John Dingell's father helped to write the Glass-Steagall law separating commercial from investment banking—the nation slowly recovered and Roosevelt's personal popularity soared. Populist rabble-rousers like Huey Long on the left and Charles Coughlin on the right lost their resonance (or, in Long's case, were assassinated)....
But Obama is going to need a lot more than his usual rhetorical flourishes in the months ahead. There's a perception, largely accurate, that one set of rules applies to one group of people—generally wealthy and well connected—and another set of rules applies to the rest. And worse, that the many are subsidizing the few, cleaning up the messes they made. In too many areas, there are zero-sum games, in which the private interests of those who have access to the levers of power are arrayed against the interests of the large mass of American citizens. Generally speaking, the people have come out losers: insurance companies against policyholders, borrowers against lenders, and, most recently and explosively, taxpayers against the banks. Regardless of how much of the bailout money comes back, there's no way to spin it other than as a transfer of wealth from public taxpayers to the shareholders, bondholders, and managers of large, poorly run financial institutions....
...Historian Alan Brinkley points out there are "interesting similarities between the trajectory of Roosevelt's presidency and Obama's. Both began with tremendous popularity and hopes and expectations, and by end of the first year of both of their terms there was quite a lot disillusionment." FDR responded with what became known as his "second New Deal"—ramming through an astonishing flurry of legislation that included the creation of Social Security and the Securities and Ex-change Commission and the Wagner Act (giving labor the right to organize and bargain collectively). "Roosevelt went through very much the same kind of uprising of anger in 1934 as Obama is experiencing," says Brinkley, but ultimately FDR managed to "outflank" it. Obama's got a more recalcitrant Congress to deal with, Brinkley notes, but he still has three more years (at least) to recover from a crisis that's far less serious.
If the president can manage to get ahead of the populist sentiment, rather than merely chase it as he's currently doing, he will begin to fulfill the hopes and expectations he raised in his campaign, and which now seem so deflated.