Obama's Old New Deal
by Mark Rhoads
Issue 123 - January 7, 2009

I was summoned by an email recently to watch a You Tube clip of "Your weekly radio address by the President-Elect."  "My" weekly address?  I thought it was Barack Obama's address.  I was not speaking, he was.  Well sir, there he was sitting behind a polished desk with that silly sign that says "Office of the President-elect" as if the Constitution provided for such an "office" for a guy who gets elected to a job and is waiting to start. 

It is times like this that I think of the late great Chicago columnist Mike Royko who died in 1997.  Suppose that Mike's fictional pal Slats Grobnik asked for radio or TV time to address all citizens of Cook County from behind a sign that said, "Office of the Trustee-Elect of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago."  Some people might laugh. But Slats would take himself seriously and that is what President-elect Barack Obama does.  He takes himself seriously too even as he churns out a cacophony of frivolous and non-serious proposals.

Don't get me wrong.  I am grateful that several of Mr. Obama's appointments for cabinet posts are not from the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party and a few are good national defense and national security choices. Others are "centrist" only in the context of a well left-of-center political party which still places them decidedly on the left of the larger American spectrum.  But in terms of policy generalities that Obama has hinted at so far, what I see coming is a superficial Potemkin Administration which could be defined as government by CliffsNotes.   

Someone reads the CliffsNotes version of Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin and then briefs Obama so he thinks he too can be a statesman by appointing rivals to the cabinet. If they had read the actual book they would know that Lincoln's "team" of rivals was not always helpful to him.  Some other Obama staffer scans a CliffsNotes version of a history of Franklin Roosevelt's first year in office about 75 years ago and Obama decides that public make-work jobs are a neat idea.  Again, if they had read actual books on the early New Deal, the Obama staff would realize that most of the pump priming of 1933-1937 had very little impact on restoring private-sector jobs and that it was not really until the spending of World War II that higher levels of productive economic activity and manufacturing jobs returned.

So with such deep briefings in mind on Dec. 6, President-Elect Obama comes out four square for New Deal-type make -work jobs, but like Bill Clinton he calls them "investments" to sugar-coat ideas that failed three decades before Obama was born.  So, Obama wants to "create" 2.5 million jobs apparently in the public sector for such chores as repairing and painting crumbling old school buildings.  Now I am for repairing old school rooms heat them and make them look better since it will make some students feel better about their drab surroundings.  But does anyone imagine that the federal government has a magic wand to actually improve reading and math skills of students who are trapped in old education factories with teachers who cannot teach?  What exactly did President-elect Obama do during his eight years in the Illinois State Senate and his four years representing Illinois as a US Senator to attack the persistently massive drop out rates of Illinois minority students when they reach 16?

Someone needs to tap President-elect Obama on the shoulder and give him five bucks so he can go out and buy a clue.  He has more Clinton-era ideas like bringing broadband Internet capacity to schools as if that will impact basic Reading and math skills.  He wants to wire up all the doctor's offices in America so that it will be even easier to share medical information as if that were a real problem that is not outweighed by the dangers of the theft of personal medical data or unaffected by the fact that doctors are rich enough to wire up their own office records if there is a demand for that.

President-elect Obama wants to do something dramatic such as FDR's New Deal or Ike's Interstate Highway system.  We have known for 30 years that America's infrastructure of roads and bridges urgently needs repair.  But how will that problem be solved by make-work jobs when the skills required are mostly found among highly skilled engineers and iron workers in trade unions that will not be wild about the idea of competition from unskilled public works employees?

Mr. Obama's training in life has left him ill-suited and yes, unprepared, to offer leadership to a country that has been so long based on a free-market driven economy.  So far, he has nothing new to offer except for nostalgic travels back in time to the failed policies of previous Democratic administrations.  So far, this is not only change that is hard to believe in but it is not really change at all from ancient Democratic schemes of our fathers.

Mark Rhoads is a former Illinois pol still in recovery who blogs at IllinoisReview.typepad.com.