The Patriot Post - The FDR Model for Buying Presidential Elections

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The Patriot Post - The FDR Model for Buying Presidential Elections
From The Federalist Patriot
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The FDR Model for Buying Presidential Elections
Redistributing Wealth and Entitlements for Votes

By Mark Alexander

September 27, 2012

"Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt." --Samuel Adams (1749)

In the conservative and business media, there is much perplexity and vexation over the inverse relationship between Barack Hussein Obama's rising job approval ratings and our nation's failing economic status. Yes, Leftmedia "Pollaganda" skewed political polls used as propaganda1 to prop up Obama, are a factor. But what mystifies some are the more reliable ratings which indicate Obama is increasing his lead over Romney.

Typifying that confusion is this missive from The Wall Street Journal: "The paradox of this presidential campaign is that the worse the economic news gets, the more Barack Obama seems to climb in the polls. The lousy unemployment numbers in May, June, July and August corresponded with a slight rise in Mr. Obama's approval rating. Ditto with the abysmal poverty numbers released two weeks ago."

It would follow then, that the latest economic data this week -- median household income declining $4,520 (8.2 percent) since Obama took office, U.S. economic growth (GDP) declining to a meager 1.3 percent, and orders for durable goods (big-ticket items) declining by 13 percent last month, may actually increase Obama's lead over the Romney-Ryan ticket2.

However, given a little insight into human nature, there is nothing contradictory about Obama's polling and the economic decline. The only thing that perplexes me about these popularity metrics is why anyone would be perplexed.

Why?

A majority of the voters who decide presidential elections -- those in the murky middle between Republicans and Democrats -- are experiencing significant distress about the future of their livelihoods. Thus, they are gravitating toward the more convincing promise of safety and security. In the context of the current presidential campaign, however defiant of logic, the "undecided" are being lured by the greatest of lies -- that socialist statism will protect them.

Some erudite analysts suggest that the upcoming election will mirror the 1980 contest3 between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. However, unlike the Carter v. Reagan paradigm of the last great recession, when Ronald Reagan4 devoted his campaign to restoring the grassroots optimism necessary for reversing the crisis of confidence5 miring our economy in the mud, Romney is facing a much more menacing foe -- an ideological socialist who is operating on the FDR paradigm.

In 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, more than 20 percent of the workforce was idle. At that time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched a campaign against Republican Herbert Hoover that was built on the populist socialism themes that had spread like a blight over Eastern Europe. The key elements of that paradigm were classist disparity6 and wealth redistribution7 -- precisely the themes Obama used during the precipitous economic decline of 2008 to defeat John McCain.

FDR, in his defense of Democratic Socialism8, offered this dubious classist assertion: "Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle." Of course, Roosevelt was paraphrasing the doctrine of Karl Marx9, whose maxim declared, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."

FDR was able to implement far more of his statist New Deal solutions in his first four years than Obama -- who has faced stiff opposition from the House of Representatives since Republicans retook the majority in 2010. But Obama, like FDR, is a master propagandist, and his populist socialist appeals10 resonate beyond the cadres of his state-dependent cult.

Some might argue that FDR had more fertile ground in which to plant his socialist seeds of dissension, but the fact is that real unemployment today is closing in on that of the Great Depression -- 19 percent rather than the current 8.1 percent figure trotted out by Obama's Bureau of Labor Statistics. The latter figure, which is much less alarming, simply ignores the millions of Americans who've given up looking for work and are thus no longer counted in the workforce, and millions more who are underemployed.

Fact is, everyone in America knows someone who has been adversely affected by our economic decline, and most Americans, regardless of political identification, are concerned about their ability to support themselves and their families. In such times of widespread economic distress, the innate tendency11 to gravitate toward perceived safety, toward even the fantasy of "Hope and Change" in order to move "Forward," is very strong.

As Patrick Henry observed at the dawn of our nation, "It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth -- and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts."

Moreover, Obama has a propaganda tool FDR could not even imagine -- the mass-Leftmedia conduit into the psyche of the American people, which he uses to dupe the ignorant into trading their votes for socialist entitlements from redistributed wealth.

FDR, in his second presidential campaign, had amassed a powerful coalition of Leftist protagonists that included leaders of urban political machines and unions, the intelligentsia and glitterati, and religious and ethnic minorities. His opponent was a Republican governor who had, in his tenure, embraced some of FDR's statist policies, but who objected to the adverse impact those policies had on private enterprise, and the resulting accumulation of national debt and inherent government waste.