Walter Shapiro: Forget the GOP; Obama's enemy is the angry public.
Seventy-three years after a white-suited Huey Long was assassinated in Baton Rouge, the iron-fisted Louisiana governor is all the rage in Barack Obama's Washington. At a time when a crash course in the New Deal has supplanted Watergate studies as the capital's requisite history lesson, attention is suddenly being paid to the Kingfish, as well as radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, the two leading 1930s tribunes of little-man economic anger. When you sit down with Obama insiders, Long's name pops up in one conversation, Coughlin's in the next. "You have to remember," says one Obama adviser, "Huey Long and left-wing populism were a much bigger problem for Franklin Roosevelt than the Republicans."
Comments like this underscore the historical reality that tough times can create irrational politics. Obama is obviously not graying or praying over the threat of a third-party challenge like the one that Long was preparing to mount against FDR in 1936. In fact, the real threat to the Obama administration may come from a corrosive anti-establishment rage that does not fit into any pre- existing political category.
Long--who dabbled at being a United States senator when he wasn't home running Louisiana from the floor of the state legislature--was the Pied Piper of class-based resentment, Hugo Chavez with a Southern accent. A large part of it was the easy-money allure of his "Share Our Wealth" plan. Long called for confiscatory taxation of all personal wealth over $8 million and outlandishly claimed that this swag from the Mellons and Rockefellers would finance a generous $5,000 grant to every U.S. household augmented by annual payments of at least $2,000. Father Coughlin (whose anti-Semitism was still muted during the early New Deal period) represented something even more potent--anti-banker, anti-Wall Street, conspiracy-theory-driven anger. Breaking with FDR in late 1934, Coughlin's radio-broadcast sermons from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, offered little in the way of coherent economic theory (his anti-capitalist ideal was vaguely akin to Mussolini's Italy), but was masterful at channeling the rage of his listeners at the shadowy international bankers.
This time around, demagoguery does not have to be particularly creative in concocting economic villains, since Central Casting has obligingly provided a rogue's gallery from the executive suites at Citigroup, AIG, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. The kindling is there for a bonfire (or is it a bond fire?) of Wall Street's vanities. All it takes is a match. ...
Read entire article at New Republic
Comments like this underscore the historical reality that tough times can create irrational politics. Obama is obviously not graying or praying over the threat of a third-party challenge like the one that Long was preparing to mount against FDR in 1936. In fact, the real threat to the Obama administration may come from a corrosive anti-establishment rage that does not fit into any pre- existing political category.
Long--who dabbled at being a United States senator when he wasn't home running Louisiana from the floor of the state legislature--was the Pied Piper of class-based resentment, Hugo Chavez with a Southern accent. A large part of it was the easy-money allure of his "Share Our Wealth" plan. Long called for confiscatory taxation of all personal wealth over $8 million and outlandishly claimed that this swag from the Mellons and Rockefellers would finance a generous $5,000 grant to every U.S. household augmented by annual payments of at least $2,000. Father Coughlin (whose anti-Semitism was still muted during the early New Deal period) represented something even more potent--anti-banker, anti-Wall Street, conspiracy-theory-driven anger. Breaking with FDR in late 1934, Coughlin's radio-broadcast sermons from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, offered little in the way of coherent economic theory (his anti-capitalist ideal was vaguely akin to Mussolini's Italy), but was masterful at channeling the rage of his listeners at the shadowy international bankers.
This time around, demagoguery does not have to be particularly creative in concocting economic villains, since Central Casting has obligingly provided a rogue's gallery from the executive suites at Citigroup, AIG, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. The kindling is there for a bonfire (or is it a bond fire?) of Wall Street's vanities. All it takes is a match. ...