Word: rooseveltism
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...terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead, and find no one there." -Franklin Roosevelt...
That is not the only difference between then and now. As President-elect, Obama extended to the outgoing Bush Administration a statesmanlike cooperation that was the exact opposite of Roosevelt's politically shrewd distancing of himself from his discredited predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Obama could have scored cheap political points by leaving such criminally mismanaged enterprises as AIG and GM to their fate. Of course, he might also have touched off an economic smashup. In pursuing what he believed to be the responsible course, Obama echoed George W. Bush's fourth-quarter abandonment of free-market gospel. For both men, survival...
...accident that the past three decades have seen the rise of sound-bite politics, of snarky bloggers and strident talk radio, not to mention cable "news" largely preoccupied with the trivial, the tactical and the tawdry. Factor in an ever more fragmented audience, and the bully pulpit of Teddy Roosevelt's imagination is in constant danger of being drowned out by a Twittering choir...
...there a way out? In theory, if the Democrats won so overwhelmingly that they controlled nearly 70 seats in the Senate, as they did when Franklin Roosevelt secured passage of Social Security and when Lyndon Johnson got Medicare through, they could simply steamroll the GOP. But America in 2010, unlike America in 1935 or '65, is closely divided between the two parties. Although bipartisanship is not an end in and of itself, the reality remains that today, and for the foreseeable future, neither party can do big, controversial things without help from the other...
...They traveled to the White House on Friday, Jan. 23, 2009, to present Obama with their ideas for the stimulus bill. They weren't greatly encouraged, though, when Obama told them at that meeting in the Roosevelt Room that "elections have consequences, and I won." Over the weekend, the GOP leadership met, and by the time House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a deal on the legislation late Sunday, they were sure that nothing they had proposed was included in the measure...