On October 31, 1936, on the eve of an election that would decide whether he would gain a second term, President Franklyn Delanor Roosevelt gave a powerful, confrontational speech which established, in clear and unequivocal language, the stakes for the American people. Listening to this speech today, it is striking how far the modern Democratic Party has wandered from its roots and how few Democratic politicians today now manifest this sort of forthrightness. Obama should take note.
FDR was a great President not because he didn't make mistakes. He made many, some of them which echo today (such as his Supreme Court packing scheme and the WW2 internment of Japanese Americans). Nor was he great simply due to his undoubted skills as a communicator, his ability to reach out to the American people using simple and straightforward language.
No, what made FDR great and established an enduring legacy that changed the course of American and world history, was that he took sides. He laid down his arguments on behalf of the working people of America and then he went to battle for them. And he identified by name the forces that were standing in opposition to those interests.
One of the finest examples of this was FDR's October 31, 1936, speech at Madison Square Garden on the eve of his re-election for a second term. But this speech was hardly unusual. FDR on many occasions said things that caused the right wing to go into apoplexy. But if he riled up the opposition, he also motivated his electoral base:
Here is the link to the opening of the speech:
http://vodpod.com/...
Obama should pay heed. It is hard to understand what is going wrong right now. But it seems like the multi-tasking young techies of the Obama White House really think you can Blackberry your way to victory. That you can build and sustain virtual electoral coalitions using hundreds of millions of emails, podcasts and social network sites to build trust.
That's not the way it works. Trust, the kind that makes people stand by you in hard times, is not built this way. It is built by sweating and bleeding and risking your political capital. It is built by taking sides.
Listen to FDR's words. It will bring tears to your eyes that Democratic leaders once spoke this way.