When I was a boy I used to listen to my grandfather comment about FDR; he didn't like him. Most people at the time thought Roosevelt was focused entirely on recovery of the economy of the nation. My grandfather recognized that Roosevelt was trying harder to change the government than he was to effect a recovery. (He also though Roosevelt was lying about keeping the US out of WWII, and was in fact planning on entering the war. He correctly predicted that Japan would attack the US because of the US policy in the Pacific.) My Grandfather thought that FDR was promoting communism, but actually he favored communism's cousin, fascism. We now have another leader who would like to transform our government to fascism. (It appears that Bush has given Obama a head start. But, back to FDR. My grandfather wasn't the only person who saw what Roosevelt was doing. From a column today by John Stossel:

(http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2008/12/24/arrogant_conceit?page=full&comments=true)

Here is what John Maynard Keynes said in an open letter to FDR:


"You are engaged on a double task, Recovery and Reform; -- recovery from the slump and the passage of those business and social reforms which are long overdue. For the first, speed and quick results are essential. The second may be urgent, too; but haste will be injurious. ... [E]ven wise and necessary Reform may, in some respects, impede and complicate Recovery. For it will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action. ... Now I am not clear, looking back over the last nine months, that the order of urgency between measures of Recovery and measures of Reform has been duly observed, or that the latter has not sometimes been mistaken for the former."

OK, so my Grandfather probably read that, and it influenced his thinking, though, as I recall, he didn't like Keynes either.

Now we have another President who wants a fascist government, something will will solidify the position of the current rich and famous. We will have to wait to see what he chooses to focus on, recovery or reform.

FDR talked a good game, but the US economy was about as bad in 1940 as when he was elected President 8 years earlier. See the book about the Great Depression, "The Forgotten Man" by Amity Shlaes.

(For those unaware of the history, Southern Democrats refused to support FDR in his quest for the Democratic Party nomination for a third term as President in 1940 unless he put his reform agenda on hold until after WWII was over: we were not yet in the war, but they knew we soon would be. FDR died before the war ended, Truman became President because the Southerners forced FDR to dump his communist VP Henry Wallace in 1944, and Republicans got control of Congress after the war. Republicans and Southern Democrats formed an alliance that killed socialism in America, at least for 50 years. It is hard to kill socialism forever because it appeals so much to people with what we now call a liberal mindset, even though it has never worked well anywhere.)