Daily Kos: What might FDR have done about the debt limit?

I keep thinking and saying that Obama had an opportunity to do as much for the country as FDR and blew it.  And continues to blow it.  This article supports that theory.  It’s long but worth reading.

I’m becoming more and more disappointed in the President and how meekly he handles the GOP and how little he is standing firm on core Democratic principles.  When he agreed to bargain with cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, he started to lose me…

This article really compares and contrasts FDR and President Obama extremely well.

Here is a brief excerpt to the article by Dante Atkins at Daily Kos:

The only recent president who has faced an economic crisis more prolonged or more severe than the one our economy faces was the progressive legend Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who faced down both the Great Depression and the Nazis with equal aplomb and bested them both, and the contrast between how Obama is handling his economic showdowns with Republicans entering his reelection and how Roosevelt handled a similar time in his presidency could not be more clear. Obama has wanted to bring the nation above politics and create a grand bargain that incorporates ideas from both parties in an attempt to prove that our country is not as divided as our politics suggests, and he has, in his own words, been repeatedly left at the altar by Republicans with no conscience who want nothing more than to destroy him and his presidency. President Roosevelt, by contrast, was ideological: he was convinced that his way of managing the economy—the Keynesian approach of government as the spender of last resort—was right, and the austerity methods of the Republicans were wrong.

Unlike Obama, Roosevelt did not accept the conservative meme that macroeconomics and microeconomics have the same fundamental principles and that government has to “live within its means like families do.” Instead, Roosevelt understood that economic downturns reduce national income and that reduced national income leads to further downturn, creating a deflationary cycle that can only be broken when government steps in to put people back to work and break the cycle—a consideration that came second to balancing the budget.

via Daily Kos: What might FDR have done about the debt limit?.