Franklin Herbert Obama

Maybe Obama is finally going to start acting more like FDR and less like Herbert Hoover.
Two years ago I interviewed the late historian Howard Zinn and he warned me that Barack's economic response to the banking crisis looked alarmingly like Hoover's. Zinn told me:

The point was that Hoover recognized there was a financial crisis and he knew that something had to be done about it. But his philosophy was the government should do very little and even that should be done by way of corporations in the private sector. So his recovery activity was basically bailouts to financial institutions.

He (Obama) is not taking sufficiently bold steps to address unemployment. During the New Deal, which of course was a much more severe economic situation, Roosevelt took much bolder steps. The WPA created 8 million jobs. That was a massive intrusion of government into the economy. Obama on the other hand seems very much dedicated to the free-market system.

Since Labor Day, Obama has finally been sounding more like Roosevelt, with a real Jobs Bill, a "Buffet tax" asking milllionaires to help with the deficit... he's finally even playing a little hardball politics to get Republicans to respond to the jobs bill.

I hope Obama is finally ready to spend less time compromising and more time fighting for the working poor like he did back in Altgeld Gardens in the 1980s. If he is, then I'll be ready to support him in the fight and pound the pavement again. Win or lose, I'll have no regrets.