There is a tendency to say that the best solutions are in the middle. Not true. Sometimes we are right and they are wrong. Then in the middle means we would get it half wrong. Even when they are right, to join them could be to lose our own credibility. Because they have been so totally wrong. And so often.
After the 1932 election, Hoover offered to FDR that they jointly support measures to restore confidence in the Banking System. FDR refused. He did not want his hands tied. There was a three month interregnum in those days from the election to the swearing in. Hoover wanted to impose a Bank Holiday to stop the run on the Banks. FDR refused that too. He did not want to taint his plan by association with the despised Hoover.
As soon as he was sworn in, FDR imposed a Bank Holiday on his own. He adapted other Hoover ideas, like the RFC. The lesson is to adopt the opposition's good ideas. But on our own terms. A joint program of Hoover and FDR would not have the credibility that the same idea implemented by FDR alone would have.
If you read FDR's inaugural address you will see that he was dealing with money changers wanting to borrow the public's money to solve their problems. He said no to them also. Quotes below the fold.
h/t Ice Blue There is an audio recording of the speech at American Rhetoric
It is as though FDR was talking directly to us across seven decades of time when he gave his inaugural in 1932:
In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.
Don't worry. Change is on the way.
Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep
Stories of our demise are greatly exaggerated. We will get over this.
Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.
Henry Paulson, I am looking at you. FDR was probably talking of Andrew Mellon, Hoover's Treasury Secretary.
The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
2008=1932. History does not repeat itself. It rhymes.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits
When was the last time a President spoke to us like this? Not since Kennedy. At least Johnson.
Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit;
There he goes again. Is this a guy a preacher?
.. we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people’s money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.
Barney Frank, take heed.
But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
Obama should say just this at his inaugural. We are facing a serious crisis.
The people of the United States have not failed.
We have not. It is Republican policies that have failed. Yet again.
Screw Bi-partisanship! Let us find a temporary fix that costs no more than say, $50B to tide us over till Jan 20. Then we reform the entire economy as FDR did. Obama and the Democratic Brain Trust of Volker, Rubin, Summers, Tyson, Reich, Krugman will come up with programs to solve this problem.
Note: I am with Kos and Sirota on the Paulson bailout plan and its descendants. I am not against all bailouts. I am against dumb bailouts.
h/t Ice Blue There is a whole recording of the speech at American Rhetoric