History Repeats Itself, Yes, But This is Remarkable

Obama: "He just moves on to another issue. Never skips a beat," a friend of mine remarked of the President. "Obama has given more speeches and made more appearances than I can recall of any president. One speech, one issue after another. Remarkable really," he concluded.

FDR: In The Forgotten Man (published in 2007), Amity Shlaes quotes Ray Moley, a one-time advisor to Roosevelt: "When one set of these objectives...faded, he provided another." And Shlaes remarks, "The fact that he shifted did not have to matter" (248).

Obama: Obama talks of unity, then famously divides. Recall the recent comment he made to a crowd prior to the mid-term elections: "We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.” A divisive comment like that is one thing coming from a candidate, it is quite another coming from the president of ALL of the people--Republican and Democrat.

FDR: "Now by defining his forgotten men as the specific groups he would help, the president was in effect forgetting the rest--creating a new forgotten man. The country was splitting into those who were Roosevelt favorites and everyone else. The division started at the top" (Shlaes 246).

Obama: After spending trillions of dollars in the first two years of his Administration, unemployment in the US has risen. Yet we are being told by the experts the economy is in recovery-- a jobless recovery.

FDR: The New Deal, also a Keynesian recovery plan that formed countless government agencies and spent billions of dollars, "was causing the country to forgo prosperity, if not recovery" (Shlaes 263). In 1934, Will Green, head of the AFL made the following point to the press, "While business has recovered half its Depression loss, only 30 percent of the Depression unemployed have been put to work." People might be speaking about recovery, but business activity was still far below 1929 levels--and it was a jobless recovery (262).

Obama/FDR Cabinets: Roosevelt was criticized that his "Brain Trusters," his advisors were largely former professors with no real world experience. The Washington Times recently published the chart below. With all the criticism of FDR's Brain Trusters take a look at Obama's Cabinet.

Nick Schulz, editor of the American Enterprise Institute's The American magazine, catches this eye-popping graph from a J.P. Morgan research report:

at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/less-10-percent-obama-cabinet-has-private-sector-experience#ixzz19EVjmrKc)

Stay Tuned. The similarities between these two Administrations are remarkable. Really.