Obama a ‘Radical’? Get Real

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By MICHAEL MEDVED

The president had finally let the mask drop and revealed himself, once and for all, as a radical ideologue far outside the American mainstream. For years, his critics had identified him as a would-be socialist dictator with a pathological hatred of the free market. In launching his campaign for re-election, he seemed to embrace that role and to announce a war to the death against the business establishment he described as “the resolute enemy within our gates.”

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” the president proclaimed. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution.”

The president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the speech (delivered on June 27, 1936) was his famed “Rendezvous with Destiny” acceptance address marking the rousing conclusion of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. In the election, Roosevelt swept 46 of the 48 states.

Seventy-five years later, conservatives should pay close attention to FDR’s example as a crucial step in placing Barack Obama in a more realistic context.

Republicans—especially in the tea party faction of the GOP—frequently charge that the current incumbent counts as an unprecedented, frightening fanatic with an alien, un-American agenda. But this view of Obama can’t possibly survive an honest examination of the record of his Democratic predecessors. Newt Gingrich, as a former professor of history, ought to know better than to characterize Obama (fatuously) as “the most radical president in American history.”

In what sense does Obama count as more radical than FDR, the patron saint of the modern Democratic Party?

Where does he advocate government intervention and expansion more sweeping, costly or constitutionally questionable than the programs of the New Deal—or, for that matter, of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society?

President Obama not only conforms to the big government, tax-and-spend traditions that have characterized his party for nearly a century; he stands squarely in the center of the Democrats’ current coalition.

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