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IF YOU LIKED HOOVER, YOU’LL LOVE OBAMA, SENATOR SAYS
Speaking on FOX News Channel today, Sen. Lindsey Graham compared the current Democratic presidential nominee to the president who was largely remembered for triggering the worst economic period in American history.
“If you liked Herbert Hoover, you’ll love Barack Obama,” Graham said. “Hoover raised taxes during economic crisis” prior to the Great Depression.
Sound familiar? That’s because it’s Obama’s plan in a nutshell. And if we elect him, maybe we too can experience the small shanty towns affectionately refered to as “Hoovervilles” which blanketed the U.S. as a result of rampant homelessness caused by really bad economic policies.
Of course, someone is going to need to explain all of this to Obama’s running mate Joe Biden, who had no idea someone named Hoover was ever president or that television didn’t come around until more than ten years after he was elected.
Last month, Biden told CBS, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”
That link about “really bad economic policies” is an interesting one.
It seems to have been written in the context of someone who was trying to say that kerry sucks and bush is awesome.
All of the figures it uses are from 2004. As we know today, that was prime booming economy times, the housing bubble was just reving up, and so forth. Hoover was just unlucky enough to be sitting in the oval office when the overheated econonmy decided to collapse.
Now, here we are again, and it seems that the powers that be can’t hold a duct taped economy together long enough to plop the mess down in Obama’s lap and blame him for it.
But really, it’s never the presidents fault. He’s not the commander and chief of the economy; blaming the president for boom’s and busts is a gross oversimplification. No single man or committee can figure out how to “run” or “fix” an economy; there are just too many pieces.
Yeah raising some taxes won’t help; but that’s a small part of the equation. What would really sink us in the near to mid future would be protective tariffs or price controls. Oh and don’t forget terrible monetary policy; but the responsibility of that falls on the Fed and not the president.
Maybe someone should remind McCain that this isn’t the worst economic crisis “of our lifetime.”
Doesn’t he remember that he was born in 1936, at the peak of the Great Depression?
Obama is not like Hoover, Hoover had class.
OK.
So If Obama is Hoover, does that mean McCain is FDR?
If we’re really gonna play this silly game, then Bush is Hoover. The economy crashed while he was in office, and there was probably something he could have done to prevent it with all that power he’s managed to grub.
Either Obama or McCain could become FDR, so long as being FDR is defined as the second guy to be president after the crash.
If you further include “FDR failed to fix the depression before his death. (No a war economy doesn’t count; prosperity doesn’t come from broken window machines)” then either modern candidate could still be FDR, since they’ll both fail to fix it.
If you want to make a president who “Successfully ended the depression.” Then you fail; no president has ever done the things nessecary to end a depression, because they only end when you leave them alone to run their course more quickly.