Kevin Baker has a piece in this month’s Harper’s making a compelling if flawed argument that Obama is more comparable to Hoover than FDR.  (The full article is not available online, but History News Network has a good excerpt summary in the above link).

As someone who rationalized his eagerness to see Al Gore make a comeback throughout 2007 by drawing an elaborate analogy between him and Hoover, I welcome much of Baker’s thesis.  He deserves enormous credit for dealing with the true Hoover both good and bad, indeed more than he should deserve in light of the shameless Arthur Schlessinger pablum peddled at the height of the recession by Jonathan Chait.

Baker’s argument is essentially that like Obama, Hoover was a progressive who believed in conciliatory approaches to big problems, who understood the magnitude of the crisis he faced better than the political elite around him but believed too much in “bringing people together” rather than fostering class warfare and social upheaval that was necessary to create big changes, a la FDR.

Baker believes that Obama is doomed to fail for this reason.  The jarringly spot-on item he marshalls to make this case is his analogy between Hoover’s reliance on such architects of the 1920s bubble as Andrew Mellon and Obama’s apparent fealty to the architect of financial deregulation Lawrence Summers.  Still, Obama has some adults in the room like Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee.

But the major problem with Baker’s argument is that, for all his admirable honesty about Hoover, he premises too much of his argument on romantic ideas about the New Deal.   In the 1930s we probably needed the CIO to knock some heads together for the sake of addressing our society’s inequities, but we are a vastly different society today.  The kind of radical reorderings which Baker admirably upbraids the Washington establishment for disregarding, such as the expansion of mass transit and fundamental health care reform, are not goals that cry out for sit-down strikes and chasing moneychangers out of the temple.

This brings us also to the glaring oversight of the article, which is that it has no discussion at all of the world situation.  Indeed all discussions of the economic crisis evade the obvious answer which Pat Buchanan has been virtually alone in emphasizing repeatedly, that we must dismantle the empire to bring our fiscal house back in order, shore up Social Security and Medicare, and even then have a peace dividend to pay for some of Obama’s proposed extravagances.

If his recent foreign policy pronouncements, and the vicious neocon response to them, are any indication, Obama seems to be proving himself our first President since Hoover who was truly, in his heart, a man of peace.  The Quaker President who aggressively pleaded for the lifting of the Versailles regime when it could have still prevented the rise of Hitler and then just days after Pearl Harbor wrote to the isolationist firebrand Lawrence Dennis lamenting “the impending triumph of Wilsonian democracy” – mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again!!!!!

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