Obama, Daley And FDR
Posted on 04. Nov, 2011 by Theodore Roe in Current Events, History
President Barack Obama
The false veneer of Change and Hope is falling away in great, gaudy strips and chunks, revealing the Chicago Machine-style play-to-play politics of the Obama system. Riddled by scandals and economic policy failures, it is not shocking to see the President’s reputation at all-time lows across the country.
What is shocking is that Gallup Polling shows that 42% of Americans STILL believe Barack Obama is doing a good job as president.
How is a man who has saddled the country with trillions of dollars in debt, packed the White House with Machine politicians (so many that it is often referred to as Chicago’s 51st Ward), given away billions of stimulus dollars and political appointments to Bundler cronies, ordered the Attorney General to ignore federal laws, openly said that the Legislative branch must be circumvented, attacked the Judicial branch and bowed to foreign kings still able to garner such a large amount of approval?
Easy. He’s a Democrat, one in the tradition of two of the best scam artists in American history: Richard M. Daley and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If you know anything about these two men, then you have access to a road map of Obama’s tactics for deflecting criticism stemming from his failures and purchasing political clout through bribes.
Richard Daley
Hailing from a dynasty that built an empire of graft and outright theft that put even Chicago Outfit’s organization to shame, Richard M. Daley, like his father before him, ran a rigged game in Chicago for decades, supposedly improving the city while stealing, hand over fist, tens (if not hundreds) of millions for himself and his friends. His time as mayor was littered with scandals, typically with the same mantra: pay-to-play. He left Chicago with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt (not even counting pension liabilities) and what did the citizens of Chicago get? Massive police shortages, some of the nation’s worst public schools, a crumbling public transportation system, ill-negotiated leases on public properties/assets, a bloated Union sector… oh, and some nice parks.
Yet Daley is still spoken of and seen in glowing terms. The University of Chicago recently added Daley as a distinguished senior fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies. Unless he’s teaching a course about money laundering, political cronyism or how to bankrupt one of the most prosperous urban areas in America, someone else might have to write his speeches. He and his son, future Chicago Mayor Patrick Daley (who is already awash in scandals of his own), have also set up an informal shop on Michigan Avenue to pedal their clout to the highest bidder. All that changed for the Daley clan is their office address.
The eternal parade of scandals? Oh, Daley didn’t know anything about that, of course. The rampant patronage and nepotism? No, no, that was everyone else, not Dick Daley. Trucks For Hire? Endless no-bid contracts given to family and friends (including Outfit-backed firms)? What? No, no, someone else was responsible for that, not the Mayor, who ran Chicago for 22 years. This Mayor was only responsible for all the good things that happened in Chicago… like parks!
If there is any one gift The Chicago Machine has lavished on Obama, it is this inherent talent to redirect negative attention from their leader. The troubles are always because of someone else, and we will find that person and fire them (if we can) or malign them if we cannot. One thing is sure though, Obama had nothing to do with anything negative.
But when it comes to misappropriating funds, Daley is small potatoes. Where he pulled his scam on a small urban area, FDR managed to hoodwink an entire country and brainwash a generation of historians to boot.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
FDR, much like Obama, took office in the throes of an economic downturn. FDR’s inheritance was worse than Obama’s, but they both did about the same thing to counteract it: spend money on votes.
Roosevelt’s horrifying economic failure, encapsulated in his stimulus package usually known as The New Deal (a term he cribbed from his cousin Teddy Roosevelt’s far superior Square Deal), was a vast and horrendous waste of resources that greatly lengthened the Great Depression. The parallels between The New Deal and the Obama Stimulus are terrifying, and the end will be the same: massive expansion of federal power, decreased productivity and degradation of private interests. FDR’s administration proved that the government was horrible at handling money and doing things on a budget. The vast waste of just the DOE’s stimulus cash under Obama eighty years later only shows that nothing has changed.
So what do you do when the cornerstone of your economic plan is obviously a shambles? Use the stimulus cash to buy votes.
When Roosevelt was set to lose his first re-election campaign to his Republican rival in 1936, he knew he needed a serious trick to save his run. The strategy that evolved was essentially a subsidies for votes program, another in a long line of pay-to-play scams in Democrat politics. WPA was out of money, but Roosevelt told Henry Morgenthau Jr., his Secretary of the Treasury, not not lay anyone off, and that he didn’t care where they got the money to keep the program going. Similar marching orders went out to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, who was told he had to fix commodity prices until November 5th, a.k.a. after the election.
Republicans, who did not have access to the unconstitutional (at least, according to the Supreme Court) levels of power Roosevelt had insulated himself with, could not compete with this tactic. All they could do was draw attention to this obvious pay-to-play ploy, but when they did so they were lambasted as being against regular Americans. Roosevelt’s expert understanding of how to wage class warfare all but guaranteed him a victory.
So history records Roosevelt’s first reelection as an avalanche of popular sentiment supporting FDR’s abuses of power, but what it really shows is that bribing people with money buys votes, a policy that the Obama administration understands greatly.
The most frightening aspect of Obama’s comparison to Daley and Roosevelt is the brutal efficacy these policies have in keeping such thieves in power. Since 1955 Chicago has been ruled by a scion of the Daley family (or, as I sometimes refer to them, the reborn Irish Mob) for all but about 12 years. Richard M. Daley is the longest-running Mayor of the city, his father, Richard J., was second longest (his reign was cut short by his death). Roosevelt’s unprecedented four terms, an unheard of abuse of presidential power, was also only cut short by his death.
Since Roosevelt’s bid to become the United States’ first monarch there has been an amendment added to the Constitution banning more than two consecutive presidential terms. However, as things continue to get worse economically, could there be a loophole found, or political maneuvering done, to keep the gravy train rolling? Could President Obama, heir to the great tradition of pay-to-play, use the same old, tired tricks to keep his office far longer than would be healthy for the United States?
While I hate to play out a doomsday scenario, I cannot get a strange image out of head. As Obama’s second term reaches its halfway point and his party gets ready to find its new torchbearer, a powerful crisis, be it a war or economic meltdown, rocks the world. It could be Europe, already in the throes of a meltdown, China, an economic balloon the proportions of which have never been seen or even the insolubility of American debt. This crisis, which would be of proportions not seen since World War II, would evoke a cry from the party faithful to not the rock the boat and keep national leadership in power, preparing a possible path for the resurgence of the American monarchy.
Is this possible? It doesn’t feel like it is, but history has told this story over and over. A leader, supposedly benign and well-meaning, takes control of a nation out of control, with the expressed purpose of returning said country to renewal and prosperity. This return to normalcy, initially promised to happen very quickly, instead takes years, then decades. There is always so much more to do, and no one else who can be trusted to do it, to insure the growth and prosperity of the nation.
In the end, however, the only thing that grows is the power of the supreme leader and his government. It happened in Germany and Russia, it is currently happening in China and, unless we remember the principals that made us great, it could happen here too.
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