BARONE

Posted at 10:51 a.m. ET

Michael Barone writes, as he always does, a thoughtful column, this time concentrating on the lessons for today of the Depression era.  We don't have to agree with everything here, but Barone is provocative:

"Not since the Great Depression." "Not since the 1930s." You hear those phrases a lot these days, and with some reason. As Congress prepares to pass the Democratic stimulus package, it may be worthwhile to look back at Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and consider how well it worked as policy -- and politically.

Some New Deal programs may have made a positive contribution to the country in some areas.  However...

After eight years of the New Deal, unemployment remained at 15 percent in 1940 -- double the figure for today. What really got us out of the Depression was World War II. The total number of employed persons and military personnel increased from 44 million in 1938 to 65 million in 1944.

And...

So it would be unwise to copy the New Deal as a recipe for economic recovery. And the policies that produced the wartime boom are not replicable today.

Unless we slide into a larger conflict through appeasement.

There has been general agreement, however, that Roosevelt's policies were politically successful. Most of us in the political commentary business make frequent use of the phrase "New Deal Democratic majority" and tend to believe that Roosevelt's policies worked for his party for a long generation extending into the 1960s.

But is it true?

I think the picture is more complicated than that. Democrats did win big in the 1934 and 1936 elections. They made big gains in large cities and factory towns, many of which were staunchly Republican in the 1920s. But these gains were not sustained, as the effects of some New Deal policies -- high taxes on high earners, the unionization-promoting Wagner Act and jobs programs like the WPA -- became apparent...

...As pro-New Deal historians have conceded, New Deal policies no longer had congressional majorities, given the opposition of many Southern Democrats. Nor was the outlook for Democrats rosy as the 1940 elections approached. Polling, then in its rudimentary stages, suggested that Republicans would win if the election were decided on domestic issues.

However, something intervened. 

But in September 1939, World War II broke out in Europe. In June 1940, France fell; Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, then allies, seemed to have most of Europe under their sway...

...(Roosevelt) won his third term in November not, as he put it later, as "Dr. New Deal," but as an experienced leader when the nation was facing grave peril.

And...

In my view, it was the war effort, the mobilization of big government, big business and big labor, that much more than the New Deal enhanced the prestige of the state.

Finally...

No two political times are ever the same. But as we watch the stimulus package moving to passage, we get the whiff of bailout favoritism and crony capitalism that was also present in the New Deal. The forced unionization envisaged by the card-check bill may prove to be no more popular than the unionization forced by the sit-ins was in Michigan and Ohio in 1938. Today's Democratic programs may get as mixed a political reaction as the New Deal did in the years before World War II.

I think Barone may take too bleak a view of the New Deal.  Much of it plainly didn't work to end the Depression, but the introduction of humane "social safety net" policies, later fully supported by Ronald Reagan, was a gain for the nation.  Also, some of the better-run unions did advance workers' interests in collective bargaining, a right now accepted by both political parties.  We've said here many times that we're a free-enterprise site, but that free enterprise doesn't mean blindness or callousness.  It certainly doesn't mean indifference to the vast corruption we've seen in some parts of the private sector.  And employees must be seen as assets to businesses, and as human beings, not just "labor costs" on a ledger.   

FDR was many things, some of them brilliant, and some of them very bad.  He was a cold, calculating and somewhat dishonest man, but a natural leader who knew how to hold the country together in a very rough time.  He was Ronald Reagan's role model. 

We don't have an FDR or a Reagan today, and that is what worries me.  Both men knew how to handle foreign crises.  The man currently in the White House does not.  A bad stimulus package won't destroy the nation or kill its citizens.  A bad foreign policy might.

February 14, 2009.