Kevin Drum found a great quotation from FDR and what he thought of bankers, monopolists, and speculators. It’s so good he deserves to have you go there and read it.
Drum’s point is that while health care may have required conciliation and moderation, “When it comes to financial regulatory reform, Obama needs to let us know whose side he’s on.” So far Obama has played the peacemaker, the reasonable man in the middle, the man who bridges divides. “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” he said last March; note that he brought up the pitchforks, but positioned himself as the center, holding back the crazies.
With financial regulation, there is no powerful force in Washington pushing for major change; Obama’s own Treasury Department is pushing for moderation. The closest thing the common man has to an advocate in Washington is Elizabeth Warren, and her job is chair of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel. So financial regulation has become a negotiation between the centrists at Treasury and the banking lobby, which is an unlikely recipe for change. I’m no Axelrod, but it seems to me that taking a stand would be good politically, too; with unemployment likely going to be high in November, taking the side of the man in the street against the man in the glass tower couldn’t hurt.
There’s another contrast to draw with FDR. This is what Arthur Schlesinger had to say about the FDR administration in 1933 in The Coming of the New Deal (p. 444):
“No business group was more proud and powerful than the bankers; none was more persuaded of its own rectitude; none more accustomed to respectful consultation by government officials. To be attacked as antisocial was bewildering; to be excluded from the formation of public policy was beyond endurance. When one remembered both the premium bankers put on inside information and the chumminess they had enjoyed with past Presidents and Secretaries of the Treasury, the new chill in Washington was the cruelest of punishments.”
Obama came into office hoping to pick up the mantle of FDR. It’s not too late.
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