The tactic the Left uses, of necessity, is creating crises to which they can plausibly claim more government is the answer.
Fannie Mae (FDR) and Freddie Mac (Great Society) failed because they made large volumes of loans that were indefensible from a business standpoint. They were virtually guaranteed to lose, since nobody was checking to see if the loans were viable. Moreover, they were backing up large volumes of Wall Street securities, implicitly using the Federal government to underwrite the risk of very shaky loans. Once this link was lost, with the failures of FM and FM, the securities were downgraded, they could no longer be sold, large companies got into unmanageable cashflow problems, and went belly up. This created general problems that, likely not due to accident, came to a head just before the election.
Left wing programs create economic chaos, which is then seized upon to create a year of Christmas’s for political fellow travellers, further regulation of Wall Street, and an expansion of the welfare state. The Depression was the same thing. Even then, in private, the conversations contrasted “reform”–socialism–with recovery, with the latter losing every time.
Here is Obama’s problem: he has no crisis. What we are in is malaise, and he used his political capital, created in the last crisis, to propose fixes that fixed nothing. Based on past history, we should be recovering, but we aren’t.
And taken honestly, we are not doing well, but we are not doing that bad either. Some 90% of Americans are gainfully employed. We are by far the world’s most powerful economy and military. We are motivated, honest people, in general.
So we are a boat that is afloat, and moving, but not at the pace it should. Obama has no platform from which to hyperventilate and scream out that we MUST do x, y, z. He will of course try to sell the imperative nature of his ideas, but we are not in a panic mode. What we are wanting and needing–and not seeing from him, because he doesn’t have them–are well thought out, serious proposals that take into account valid economic principles.
When the limelight comes on him, it will show a lot of the flaws that he has been trying so hard to hide. Of course, absent a complicit media, he would not have been elected, so any amount of serious coverage can only hurt this very mediocre, unprincipled man.