Reply #52: Fair enough.

[smoogatz]

While it's true that Carter was handed a big old Republican-hangover shit sandwich, it's also true that he didn't learn anything from history. You have to take dramatic steps when times are hard, and make sure that people understand how your policies are different from the ones that got us in all that trouble in the first place. And in that case I think Obama could learn from Carter, indeed. But the guy he really needs to study is FDR, who came into office with guns blazing. Of course times were considerably worse: unemployment at 25%, no functioning banking system, a catastrophic loss of national wealth and capital, massive displacement of farm families and workers across a big chunk of the country, illiteracy, malnutrition, rural poverty so stark it could have been happening in Kazakhstan or China. But FDR understood, politically, which side his bread was buttered on, and who his natural constituency was--the people he called "the common man." That's Obama's constituency, too--or it ought to be. The question is whether he really gets that, and whether the people around him (talking about you, Rahm) are actually interested in serving that constituency.