The GOP's inviolate article of faith is that big
government is inherently evil. The GOP has been stupendously successful through
much of the last century in tagging any Democrat that champions increased
regulatory powers, higher taxes on corporations and the rich, greater public
spending on health, education and job programs, and bolstering entitlement programs
as a reckless, tax and spend, enemy of private enterprise. Franklin Roosevelt
was no exception to the maligning. Often forgotten in the historic lionizing of
FDR for standing government on its head to blunt the hard edge of the Great
Depression, was that the GOP with some help from a small but pesky clique of
Democratic congressional conservatives, big industrialists, and conservative
newspaper moguls fought FDR tooth and nail on every one of his reform proposals
from Social Security to tighter industry regulation. Also forgotten, is that
FDR had to tweak, compromise, and water down his proposals, even the successful
ones, to get passage. His more far reaching proposal for a national health care
plan never got off the ground.
No president, and that includes FDR, has been a harder
target of the GOP attack line on government than President Obama. The vast
storehouse of political slurs, snide innuendoes, verbal broadsides, and name
calling has been heaped on his head. The aim is to permanently tag him as the
penultimate example of a Democratic president that would make big government
the all-embracing, all encompassing, arbiter of American life, at the expense
of the private sector. During his first term, this withering assault by the GOP
forced Obama to bend over backward to conciliate, compromise, and water down
and even shelf many proposals to expand government protections and benefits to
poor and working persons.
The November presidential elections partially changed
this. Obama got just enough of a popular mandate to be more daring on Medicare,
Medicaid, and Social Security, dumping the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, a
sharp increase in the minimum wage, and
spending even more billions on public and private job growth. This has
brought back the howls of a big government over reach and dire warnings that
this will gut big business. The Roosevelt comparison is in order here.
Following his landslide reelection victory in 1936, he ignored
the administration baiters and lurched left. He increased spending on job
programs, continued to pound the "economic royalists" for subverting
the economy, and attacked auto and steel giants and the superrich "Sixty
Families" for doing everything to stymie the recovery. FDR upped the ante
even higher when he appointed Robert Jackson as the aggressive new director of
the antitrust division of the Justice Department with a clear mandate to hit
hard at the trusts. FDR railed that they were blocking his program and
micromanaging the GOP rightwing attacks and takeover. In a fireside chat, FDR
talked bluntly with the American people immediately after the 1938 election and
made it clear he would not reverse course and that he'd do everything he could
to "create an economic upturn" by keeping the government firmly in
the business of creating jobs and economic security for the millions still
suffering from the Depression.
2013 is pretty much the same. The GOP retained the House,
and its party line is that millions of Americans still loudly clamor for a
return to fiscal conservatism, and a sprint backward on expanding government
programs in education, housing, and highway and urban infrastructure
construction and reconstruction. Polls, of course, show the exact opposite. The
majority of voters want Congress to work with the president on solving the
nation's problems, most importantly that means the economy. The big sticking
point, though, is the looming sequester. This mandates draconian budget cuts in
defense and non-defense programs and services.
Polls show that the majority of Americans want to avoid the cuts, and
the way to do that is to put even more of the tax squeeze on the wealthy. This
does not fit into the GOP attack line against big government and Obama.
But there's too much political risk now in the GOP's
mounting an all-out frontal attack on Obama and his plan for more government
spending in vital areas. So the new code word for that is simply to continue to
pound on the need for deficit reduction, and fiscal restraint. This has just
enough public and administration resonance to appear sensible, moderate and
reasonable.
Obama and Democrats have given no sign they'll bow to the
GOP's end around against government. They have come up with proposals to stave off
the hardest and most devastating cuts to
everything from Head Start to Food Nutrition programs and hundreds of other
programs for the poor and working class the GOP demands.
FDR didn't panic in the face of the GOP's paint of him as
an architect of evil government. He stayed the course, remained true to his
populist faith, turned the tables back on his foes, and dared them to move the
country forward not backward. Obama appears willing to do the same. And that
means slaying the GOP myth of "evil" big government.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst.
He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network.
He is the author of How Obama Governed:
The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America
Media. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK-Radio and the
Pacifica Network, and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
1
1
1
