Stephen C. Rose: President Obama's FDR Problem
[He attended Phillips Exeter and finished Williams College Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in Political Science and English. He received his Masters from Union Theological Seminary and spent the 1960s as a participant-writer in the Civil Rights movement, reporting from Birmingham, Oxford and Selma. He interviewed Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Saul Alinsky. He also wrote extensively on church and urban affairs and founded a prize-winning magazine Renewal in Chicago...]
President Obama is the first president in my memory to have the FDR problem. That problem in a word is hate. The reason is the same.
I am old enough to remember the hate on the lips of kids I went to school with in the early 1940s.
Roosevelt was hated by the right because he was transparently oriented to doing for all what the right felt was deserved only by those who embraced their version of a free enterprise system. Roosevelt naturally made a mockery of this logic while achieving high profile movements that looked a lot like just the change conservatives abhorred.
Obama is stoking the flames of this hate as we speak. Those of us who are for his agenda need to batten down and prepare for a battle.
We can say with confidence:
Obama is a centrist, not a socialist -- and back it up with facts.
Government has intervened when it needed to under Repubicans and Democrats.
The Obama program of spending is absolutely necessary as the economy morphs into an engine that serves the needs and desires of this century, which have less to do with conspicuous consumption than smarts and survival.
Whatever your viewpoint, stow the hate. It is unbecoming, immature, sadly revealing and not worth the wear and tear on body, mind and soul.
Thank god we are, shakily but in fact, a nation of laws. The law is our best protection when hate flares into active mayhem. We need well trained and nonpartisan law enforcement that does not go off half-cocked, but which recognizes that we are going through a time of change when the same hate that FDR experienced is being loaded onto our President.
Read entire article at Huffington Post
President Obama is the first president in my memory to have the FDR problem. That problem in a word is hate. The reason is the same.
I am old enough to remember the hate on the lips of kids I went to school with in the early 1940s.
Roosevelt was hated by the right because he was transparently oriented to doing for all what the right felt was deserved only by those who embraced their version of a free enterprise system. Roosevelt naturally made a mockery of this logic while achieving high profile movements that looked a lot like just the change conservatives abhorred.
Obama is stoking the flames of this hate as we speak. Those of us who are for his agenda need to batten down and prepare for a battle.
We can say with confidence:
Obama is a centrist, not a socialist -- and back it up with facts.
Government has intervened when it needed to under Repubicans and Democrats.
The Obama program of spending is absolutely necessary as the economy morphs into an engine that serves the needs and desires of this century, which have less to do with conspicuous consumption than smarts and survival.
Whatever your viewpoint, stow the hate. It is unbecoming, immature, sadly revealing and not worth the wear and tear on body, mind and soul.
Thank god we are, shakily but in fact, a nation of laws. The law is our best protection when hate flares into active mayhem. We need well trained and nonpartisan law enforcement that does not go off half-cocked, but which recognizes that we are going through a time of change when the same hate that FDR experienced is being loaded onto our President.