krebscycle

The intensity of the right wing corporate campaign to remove Barack Obama from the White House is undeniable. A disciplined and unprecedented campaign of obstruction in Congress was followed by a putsch-like judicial insurrection that overturned 100 years of laws limiting campaign expenses. A  lavishly funded national campaign to  suppress black and young people’s votes was supported by  a large-scale Goebblesesque  crescendo on Hate-Radio and Fox. The usual complicity in the “mainstream” media has been supplemented with billions of dollars in media spending and everything from employers threatening workers with massive layoffs in case of a Romney loss to media companies distributing anti-Obama movies at no cost.  The response of the “left” in the United States has been to, well, to chime in and help the far right depress voter turnout.  Tellingly, “left” critics of the Administration who spent 3 years distorting 2008 campaign donation records to “prove” that Goldman-Sachs owned Mr. Obama’s administration, have forgotten to look at public records now that the Mississippi River flood of corporate money to Romney/Ryan has overflowed the levies.

Here’s Eric Rauchway, three weeks before election day,  at “left of center"  blog Crooked Timber, lamenting President Obama’s failure to live up to Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy

But the problem comes partly from Roosevelt himself: he is unrepackageable for modern America. He had too little reverence for the financiers who are the acknowledged masters of our universe – his attitude toward them ranged from what one banker called merely “naughty” to sadism – when his program to raise commodity prices brought squeals from short-sellers, he ordered Henry Morgenthau, Jr., to “squeeze the life out of the shorts and put the price up just as far as you can.” He said so, Morgenthau wrote at the time, “with fight in his tone of voice.”    

You can read the note yourself and what you should notice is that, like much of the "left critique” of President Obama, its focus is on skin voice tone. The fact that a gen-x black guy from the lower middle class does not project in the same way as an ultra-patrician white Alpha-male from the 1930s has been an endless source of disappointment for the liberal elite. The Roosevelt family has been part of the US ruling elite since the 1600s. Franklin Roosevelt, even more than Mitt Romney, looked and sounded “presidential” ( Romney’s main asset as a campaigner is that he is also born to the ruling elite and looks and sounds the part.)  FDR was an archetypical upper class white man, born to command, a product of both an elite family and the prep-school to Ivies inner path. All of us, regardless of race, creed, color or self-assessed level of enlightenment have been conditioned to admire and obey all the signifiers of status that FDR beamed out over radio and newsreels.  In fact, one of Roosevelt’s strengths as  social reformer came from his immunity to the usual conservative argument that critics are motivated by envy and crippled by lack of “leadership” qualities. When Roosevelt excoriated financiers, he was attacking his social peers and, often, social class inferiors. If the way he spoke “sounds” stronger to our ears it is because that’s what we have been conditioned to hear.

One thing you will not find in Rauchway’s note, or in 100 mostly Obama hostile comments that follow, or in most of the left critique is a substantive and reality based criticism in terms of actual alternatives.  Roosevelt’s policies were substantially less ambitious than Obama’s, especially in the first term. The most drastic economic actions of the new Presidency were to take the country off the gold standard and take on a smaller version of what the Federal Reserve Bank did in 2007-2009.  The enormous stimulus spending Obama signed less than a month after taking office, the vast automatic increase in spending that the recession triggered in unemployment insurance payments and food stamps, the ambitious scaling up of Medicare in the health reform, the audacious manufacturing policy – all those dwarf, even relative to the size of the economy, the halting first term steps taken by Roosevelt, with his 70% majorities in Congress and divided opposition. The reason for the upper class insurrection against Obama is obvious, but our “left”, nostalgic for the days when Men Were Upper Class White Men, is not willing or able to come to terms with reality.

See also: Mythologizing FDR.