Translation

.يولد جميع الناس أحرارا متساوين في الكرامة والحقوق. وقد وهبوا عقلا وضميرا وعليهم أن يعامل بعضهم بعضا بروح الإخاء‎
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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Why Bush is no Hoover (but Worse!): Unprecendented Do-Nothingness in a President’s Final Days

There have been a number of comparisons of late between FDR and Barack Obama and between Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush. But those comparisons are unfair. Obama may yet turn out to be another Roosevelt, but “W.” is no Hoover, he’s worse.

This is true in part because Hoover’s actions during the 1932-33 presidential transition are often underrated but also because W.’s complete and total abdication of responsibility for leadership in his last few months in office is largely unprecedented.

No president on his way out of office has been as laconic in the face of crisis as is our current president. At the end of his presidency James Buchanan labored mightily (albeit unsuccessfully) to hold the Union together. Truman frantically tried to end the Korean War in his last few months in office as did Lyndon Johnson in trying to end the war in Vietnam.

Grant ordered troops to guard the polls and supervise vote tabulation in three southern states while a congressional commission tried to sort out the mess that was the election of 1876. As it turned out the election wasn’t decided until March 2, 1877, two days before the inauguration, in favor of the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Democrats were so angry and the threat of insurrection so real, that Grant quietly began to beef up the military’s presence in Washington D.C. to fend off a threatened attack on the Capitol.

Even after he lost the election of 1932, Herbert Hoover strove mightily to stem the tide of economic collapse. Hoover, in fact, adopted many of the reforms that were later to become the cornerstone of the New Deal. He chartered the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, designed to prevent banks from going belly up. He had already adopted Keynesian economics by trying to stimulate the economy by running up a huge Federal deficit (mainly by cutting taxes). Hoover founded the Federal Home Loan Bank to prevent home foreclosures. He even encouraged public works projects through the RFC and through the Emergency Relief and Construction Act (both efforts were continued byRoosevelt in the New Deal).

By the time Roosevelt became president many states had already declared bank holidays. In fact, a number of holdovers from the Hoover Department of the Treasury stayed on an extra couple of months to help Roosevelt draft the earliest financial reforms passed by Congress in the new president’s first 100 days.

Roosevelt, for his part, was almost completely uncooperative with Hoover during the transition. Hoover believed that Roosevelt was intentionally trying to tank the economy in order to discredit Hoover and burnish, by contrast, the image of the new administration. Roosevelt believed that Hoover was trying to lock him into policies (many of which FDR ultimately adopted) that would limit his actions after he became president.

None of this seems to be going on in the current transition. Of course, the current crisis isn’t of the magnitude of the Great Depression, yet. And the Bush Administration has supported one of the largest corporate bailouts in history.

But there is a curious lack of thought or follow through in its efforts. AIG is still reeling and there is no direction or form in the Treasury’s handling of the $750 billion in funds that was originally allocated to buy up toxic mortgages from lenders. But now the plan is just to give money to the lenders and hope they will lend it to businesses and consumers (which they aren’t).

Throughout this crisis the President has been largely absent. But leaving the job to an outgoing Treasury Secretary or an incoming president isn’t enough. In the sixty or so days before the Inauguration a lot can go wrong and Bush isn’t trying to prevent it.

That’s why Bush is no Hoover, he’s worse.

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Daniel Franklin

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