Obama Says FDR Was "Fiscally Conservative"

Brian Koenig ^ | 7/25/11 | Brian Koenig

[meatloaf]

I don’t think they make cattle prods with enough power to do him any good.

[x]

Over the last ten years or so, the liberal media started painting FDR as a "fiscal conservative," even though in the context of his own day he wasn't thought of in such terms. It was a redefinition or recontextualization of "fiscal conservative" to mean "against tax cuts," rather than "for lower spending and lower deficits," and was largely directed at the Bush administration.

The key name here is Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor who wrote "The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal: Fiscal Conservatism and the Roosevelt Administration, 1933-1938" in 2000. The other names to know are Lewis Douglas and Henry Morgenthau, fiscally conservative members of FDR's adminstration. But Douglas resigned in protest against FDR's free spending ways. Morgenthau stayed on because he was a close friend of Roosevelt's, not because he agreed with the high spending.

This new narrative found a little support among neocons who wanted to make Obama look bad by comparing him to the very early days of Roosevelt's administration, when FDR was still rather fiscally responsible, but you have to go with what people living at the time thought, and for most of them Roosevelt, whatever his other qualities, wasn't fiscally conservative.

Fun Fact: "As Secretary of the Treasury, Morgenthau was first person in the presidential line of succession from June 27 to July 3, 1945, following the resignation of Secretary of State Edward Stettinius and [before] the U.S. Senate confirmation of James Byrnes. Had President Truman died, resigned or been removed from office otherwise during those seven days, Morgenthau would have become Acting President of the United States until the end of the presidential term in 1949."