New Deal gets Raw Deal from the right
February 10, 2009 1:42 pm ET by Karl Frisch
Pam’s House Blend picks up on the right’s revisionist New Deal history as does Down with Tyranny who notes:
...their latest assault on reality, echoed by Limbaugh's cadres in Congress: The New Deal Was A Failure. Franklin D Roosevelt won his first term against a pillar of Republicanism, incumbent reactionary Republican Herbert Hoover. Hoover managed to garner 59 electoral votes against FDR's 472. At that point Roosevelt embarked upon the most successful economic recovery plan in the history of the United States, the New Deal, meant to lift the country out of the Depression that decades of unregulated right-wing economic policies had caused.
When Roosevelt ran for re-election in 1936, his opponent, Kansas Governor Alf Landon, a tax cuttin' anti labor union fanatic, only managed to win two states, Maine and Vermont (8 electoral votes). He even lost Kansas. FDR's 523 electoral votes also saw the Republican Senate caucus drop down 16 members. In the House the GOP managed to hold onto 88 seats (20%). Although Republicans were screaming the same tired anti-working family nonsense then that they're screaming now, the voters, cognizant of their unblemished record of dismal failure, were ignoring them.
In 1940 the GOP candidate, Wendell Wilkie, campaigning on a platform calling the New Deal inefficient and corrupt and not subservient enough to Big Business, led the GOP to another well-earned electoral catastrophe. The only states he won were Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado, for a total of 82 electoral votes (to Roosevelt's 449). Roosevelt's last run, in 1944, was against Thomas Dewey, who wound up with 99 electoral votes (to FDR's 432) after he added "communism" to the charges Wilkie had run on against the New Deal.
My column this week was on this very subject. If you’ve not yet seen this great video of MSNBC's David Shuster and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter discussing right-wing attacks on the New Deal, check it out:
Well here's a lesson in history people! What they fail to tell you or you tell the public, is that F.D.R raised taxes during the depression. Then he created welfare and social security. It was was World War II that pulled America out of the Great Depression. The War Machine that was created to fight the war, is what put the masses with jobs. Not only that but our allies bought our equipment.
It's wasn't pork barrel spending, or trivial programs like your current President is doing now. If you think hes not putting pork in the stimulus bill. you explain the absurd reason for putting Frisbee Golf course in Austin Texas. If you believe that Obama's government is transparent then ask him to put a written copy of the bill on all the papers of the nation . I'm sure at best he would find a way to weisel his way out of the whole idea! Your media is lying to people. when the truth comes out. I hope all of you lose your jobs!