Obama’s Recipe: Two Parts FDR, Dash of Reagan

by Peter Brown Abraham Lincoln may be President Barack Obama ’s favorite predecessor, but in his early White House days his recipe has been two parts Franklin D. Roosevelt with a dash of Ronald Reagan . As time goes on, it appears he’s even more likely to follow the FDR model. That’s only partially because Messrs. Obama and Roosevelt share the Democratic label and its accompanying philosophy, even though the dominant party mindset is very different today than it was in the 1930s and 1940s. Mr. Obama’s path is the product of two more important factors: Like FDR, he has a Congress strongly controlled by his own party, and the nature of the economic challenge is more like what America faced in the 1930s than at the start of the Reagan era in the early 1980s. Although Mr. Obama talks bipartisanship, his Capitol Hill allies see the large Democratic majorities as the public’s proxy to enact their agenda and are under no illusion that meaningful compromise with their Republican colleagues is ... (link)