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“There are no great men. Just great challenges which ordinary men, out of necessity, are forced by circumstance to meet.”
– Admiral William Frederick (Bull) Halsey Jr.
The current state of the domestic economy, described by expert observers to be approaching the depths of the Great Depression in several categories, creates a situation in the White House which can only be described as desperate. There are few people in the world prepared to address a challenge of this magnitude, and yet circumstance demands address on a scale so monumental that all the crises of the previous three administrations combined are dwarfed by the prospect. No other American President, save Franklin Roosevelt himself, could comprehend the infinite forces at work to confound any straightforward solutions. It might be enlightening to compare the approaches employed by the two national leaders in the face of economic Armageddon, at the same time allowing for the different eras in much the same way as baseball fans compare Ty Cobb to Rod Carew.
To be fair, the effects of the Great Depression on unemployment didn’t completely disappear until soon after the ramp up to war at the start of the 1940s. The banking crisis, one of the immediate results of the 1929 stock market collapse, worked itself out early in the process, same as at present and for the same reason: the power of the president, through the Federal Reserve, to directly manipulate capital reserves within the banking industry. Stock market values fluctuated wildly throughout the Thirties, same as now and for the same reason: the inability on the part of either administration to instill confidence and provide justification for long-term investment by wealthy institutions and individuals. The reluctance then, as now, could be partly attributed to political intransigence. For FDR, the Taft wing of the Republican Party and the conservative Democrats of the American Liberty League proved impediments in Congress to the administration’s progressive agenda. Roosevelt’s weapon early on was in the use of mass media campaigns to force purely social, and generally popular, New Deal programs through the House and Senate, while simultaneously and surreptitiously increasing federal power to control the marketplace.
The results of some of those programs, such as the National Recovery Administration, with its big blue eagle emblematic of a tacit government endorsement of member businesses, turned out to be detrimental to the recovery in terms of their overall effect. The act from which the NRA sprung was ultimately ruled unconstitutional because it exceeded the express limits of congressional authority, going so far as to (in practice) fix the local price of plucked chickens. However, some elements of the overturned law resurfaced (restrictions on child labor, minimum wages, reduced work hours and the right of workers to organize) under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. More importantly, the mere effort to control conditions established the tone of a government actively, if somewhat ineffectively, trying to address important issues facing average citizens. Purely from a morale-building aspect, such activity provided a tremendous boost to a beleaguered country and helped many keep their focus on a better tomorrow.
The Obama administration was philosophically correct in reviving the spirit of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which George W. Bush had reluctantly instituted as a way of relieving the short-term credit crunch. The Obama version, entitled the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, attempted to stimulate growth in the overall economy, albeit using a scattershot approach. Poorly developed strategically and communicated in an inaccessible (for most citizens) form of DC legalese, the broad, top-down initiative failed primarily because it relied on the (publicly traded) private banking industry to loosen credit requirements at a time when the sting from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the near-collapse of AIG was still fresh in bankers’ minds.
TARP (theoretically, at least) gave the U.S. Treasury the means to control activity at large financial institutions while keeping credit markets liquid despite the self-inflicted mortgage instrument catastrophe. ARRA was supposed to further lubricate stalled credit markets and return our credit-based system to its function of promoting growth, while at the same time providing increased funding for local social mandates (such as unemployment insurance) that were straining state budgets. Loose monitoring of those funds distributed, along with the reluctance of some states to accept the strings attached to the federal government largesse, resulted in the effort making little impact along Main Street.
Obama’s failure, on the psychological level, is more telling than that of FDR because of the difference in demographics between then and now. Here, we’re comparing apples and oranges … or Cobb and Carew. In the Great Depression, there was no appreciable “middle-class” left to serve by 1932. Families were either well-off or coping with various levels of want. Thus, social programs of that time, aimed at the impoverished masses, provided potential benefits to a larger percentage of people. By comparison, the ARRA program’s social initiative aspects were aimed mostly at those who were classified as working-poor or chronically underemployed even before the bottom fell out. Furthermore, unemployment insurance alone could not pay the mortgage and taxes for those previously upwardly-mobile members of our society. The housing market, now a key element in economic growth and a (formerly) reliable investment instrument for nearly everyone with a decent job, collapsed in stages and banks compounded matters by fast-tracking the foreclosure process. The number of farming communities wiped out by the dust and economic squalor of the 1930s represents a speck on the ledger in comparison to the multitude of homesteads affected in our current situation. Lost equity alone numbers in the trillions of dollars.
Today, there are no Taft Republicans. The conservative Democrats of the Deep South and the Farm Belt are long gone, but conservatism in new forms is proving a considerable roadblock to any meaningful stopgap measures that must, by law, originate in Congress. When Roosevelt found his policies endangered by the opposition, he attacked from all angles and made every possible effort to beat his political enemies into submission. President Obama is not cut from that cloth, not personally familiar with, or competently advised on, the art of close backroom combat. Rather than fight, the administration strives for compromise. In seeking common ground and political consensus his administration continually gives ground and the national constituency suffers the consequences. More troubling, the administration appears to be throwing in the towel on any short-term relief measures regarding the housing sector. The number of families driven from their homes as a result of the continuing dearth of employment opportunities will continue to increase, resulting in the further erosion of property values. Equity, even for those still gainfully employed, completely vanishes eventually, along with a property’s value as collateral for investment. If he does nothing else of consequence, the current sitting President must end this cycle now, by any means necessary.
In his time, Ty Cobb was, arguably, the greatest pure hitter. The same argument could also apply to Rod Carew, but we can all agree that for Carew, the nature of the game was different and, likely, less favorable to success. That did not stop him from stepping up to the plate and taking his swings. He did not allow circumstance to dictate results and, in facing that challenge, he allowed greatness to find him. In order for greatness to find anyone, they must strive to overcome all the obstacles placed in their particular path. For a leader, merely overcoming such obstacles is not enough. The greatness of a leader depends on the ability to guide the rest of us past those same obstacles. I, for one, am happy to let others lead if they exhibit an ability and a willingness to do so. If they fail in the attempt, I feel just as responsible for the failure. If they fail to even try, it is on their heads alone that history will lay the blame.
