Obama’s own ‘Rendezvous With Destiny’

[babylonsister]

http://washingtonindependent.com/20243/remembering-fdr

Obama’s own ‘Rendezvous With Destiny’
To a Nation Reeling From Let-‘er-rip Capitalism, Roosevelt Introduced a Revolutionary Idea -- Security.
By David M. Kennedy 11/27/08 6:00 AM



President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Tennessee Valley Authority Act in 1933. (tva.gov)


President-elect Barack Obama is confronting a cascading economic crisis, which seems to worsen by the day, not the week. As venerable banking houses collapse, once-mighty industries teeter on the brink of oblivion and unemployment mounts, the air thickens with recollections of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and comparisons between Obama and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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“We are going to make a country,” Roosevelt once remarked, “in which no one is left out.”

In that unadorned sentence, Roosevelt summed up his highest purposes and his lasting accomplishments. The New Deal’s legacy was to give countless Americans, who until then had never had much of it, a strong sense of security. And with it, Roosevelt gave them a deeper sense of having a stake in their country and a bond with their countrymen.

Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, seems to have taken this essential history lesson on board. “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste,” he said recently. “It’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”

Like Roosevelt, Obama faces an urgent economic crisis. Like Roosevelt, Obama must use the (now considerably greater) powers of government to restore economic health. But like Roosevelt, Obama will ultimately be judged not simply on whether or how he ended this crisis, but on how he used it.

We have our own accumulated social and human deficits. Some, like the lack of universal health care, have been begging for attention since Roosevelt’s time. Others, including a crumbling infrastructure, struggling public schools, climate change, energy dependence, environmental degradation, widening income disparity and illegal immigration, have been festering merely for the last several decades.

If this generation is to have its own rendezvous with destiny, and if Obama wants to stand in FDR’s company, those matters can no longer be avoided.


David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University. He won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.”