One figure looms large over all his successors as the worst US president ever.
Barack Obama was not the worst president in US history. That honor goes to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was dead before most of us were born. Any education in history threatens to shed light on present conditions, so it’s been eliminated from curricula, replaced with pandering propaganda. Proper instruction would teach that FDR effected the sea change that transformed the US from a melting pot of mostly self-confident, self-reliant, marvelously competent individuals into a bankrupt welfare and warfare state, the majority of whose citizens are jumpy at their own shadows, afraid of their fellow citizens, and terrified of their politicians. Mr. Obama has merely been mop-up relief for the welfare-warfare team’s starter, FDR.
Roosevelt had his forerunners—Lincoln and Wilson—but he presided over the largest agglomeration of power by the US government ever. His tactic was breathtakingly simple: use the government’s failures to expand the government. To address what should have been a garden-variety stock market correction and recession, exacerbated by Hoover’s ineffective nostrums, Roosevelt took economic power away from millions of diffuse individuals and businesses, acting in their own interests, and consolidated it in Washington. It didn’t work. The economic statistics were worse in 1938 than they were when FDR took office in 1933, but failed programs were expanded and new ones added to “solve” the problems created by the earlier programs.
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