Henry Morganthau and The Great Depression

From Jim Taranto's column comes this bit of nonsense about messaging and vision and transformation and on and on. It's hard to know where to begin to comment on the thoughts expressed here because they are so confused and lacking in relevance.  For example some commenter makes the point Obama compares unfavorably to FDR for "failing to single out "villains" including "Wall Street gamblers", "conservative extremists"and George W. Bush ...".  What's wrong with this "observation", at least to those of us who have read historians other than those who deified FDR and his misguided New Deal, is the fact that by any reasonably thought out standards, the New Deal was a colossal failure.  Consider this 1939 quote (10 years after the Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression) from one of its architects and key administrators, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and now if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosper. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And enormous debt to boot.”

So, dingbat commenters think Obama should model himself after a president whose policies prolonged the Great Recession into a ten-year nightmare and like FDR should demonize his opponents more in order to rally the American people more to his cause.  Anyone who can to explain the logic of this thinking deserves an advanced degree in philosophy.

Jim Taranto comments:

Drew Westen, a psychologist cum political tactician, who in a lengthy and much-discussed (including in this column) New York Times op-ed faulted the president for having failed to tell "a story the American people were waiting to hear--and needed to hear." Westen compared Obama unfavorably to FDR, faulting him for failing to single out "villains" including "Wall Street gamblers," "conservative extremists" and George W. Bush and for not beginning his presidency by making clear his intention to steamroll congressional Republicans, back when that was an option. In response, Time's Joe Klein enthused:
Obama is often eloquent. . . . But he has never deployed these skills in service of the larger story--never really explained where we are as a country, how we got here and--Westen is spot on here--who the villains have been. He has never gone to war on behalf of the American people. . . .
[Obama and Jimmy Carter] do share a trait: an inability to tell a story. The most popular stories have good guys and bad guys. If he wants to be re-elected, Obama is going to have to start telling us who the bad guys are and what he plans to do about them.
Obama won re-election, but would anyone really describe the 2012 Obama campaign as a clinic in exegetical politics? Did Obama lay out a compelling case for his principles? Far from it. In fact, his clearest ideological statement was "You didn't build that." His supporters spent weeks insisting he didn't say that.
What Obama did do successfully was vilify his opponent ("not one of us") and make narrow, often fear-based appeals to particular interest groups. His campaign also demonstrated a mastery of technology for identifying voters and coaxing them to the polls.

Taranto concludes:  So maybe conservatives should snap out of it. If the left emerged triumphant from the slough of despond in barely a year, there's no reason the right can't do it too. But it's no clearer now than it was then that the answer lies in better "messaging." (Incidentally, maybe if you want to message good, you shouldn't use nouns as verbs.) And talking about the need for better messaging isn't going to win any elections. To be sure, neither is writing about talking about messaging. But we promise never to run for anything.