Whatever Obama's 'urgency of now' meant to voters, including long-suffering gay voters, the economic crisis has doubled it. Or, tripled it.
FDR had years of crisis to enact a truly broad ranging legislative agenda. Today, by contrast, there is a sense that this crisis is moving along faster than in the aftermath of the 1929 "crash", although no one knows the eventual depths of it.
Paul Krugman's recent assessment (and follow-on) caught my eye, because it is similar to what people are saying about new financial regulation:
That’s for later. The priority right now ...
One advantage that FDR had is that he did not have Keynes. The General Theory wasn't published until 1936. What I mean is that he was free to conceive of his changes as a realignment of social-economic priorities, as a "New Deal". Today, instead, we have a "bold stimulus package", promised formally by a functionary, Larry Summers (alongside others).
Do you see the difference? FDR pushed through structural changes, as a priority with a political conception at their core, as much as anything, a re-prioritization of social-economic life in America (at a time when the U.S. was hardly the world financial and military power it would become, in a pre Bretton-Woods world, to boot).
Today, we risk kicking that can down the road, partly because of our belief in "economics".
Instead, is it not possible to do two things at once, during crisis, even with a Democratic Congress?
Who knows, but the sense that so much needs to be done, the fierce urgency of it, in the near-term, seems to have passed along with the banking panic of 2008. In short, we still believe we are invincible, economically, right?
S&P500 @ 897
2-10 spread at 135, 3-month LIBOR greater than 2/10, at 1.425% ...
