The NEA, FDR, and Obama's coming turn

by smkovalinsky | September 27, 2009 at 12:45 pm

115 views | 2 Recommendations | 0 comments

It is small wonder that Yosi Sergant, who helped to make Shepherd Fairey's "Hope" posters of Obama the national icon during election season, would attempt to gather this into now President Obama's legislative agenda, via the NEA. Of course this was not going to be tolerated, and Sergant was promptly thrown under the bus.
But what if Obama is biding his time?
What if this is a prelude to another arm of Obama: What if there were to be fashioned some newly created vehicle, without precedent, once the Obama Administration has taken FDR's sharp turn?

Of all the images hurled forth by the last presidential election, none will live longer than Shepard Fairey’s poster of a red, white, and blue Barack Obama, gazing significantly into the distance, resting atop the single word Hope. It had already been embossed into the national consciousness as the definitive image of Obama even before it was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery and appeared as the cover of Time’s “Person of the Year” issue. His poignant mien seemed to encapsulate all his personality and promise, an expression that was at once solemn, pensive, yearning, and ever so slightly sorrowful. With good reason the critic Peter Schjeldahl termed it “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You.’”

Campaign posters are discarded like yesterday’s newspaper the morning after an election, but not in the case of Obama. If anything, the demand for posters bearing his image has only grown. A recent New York Times front-page story highlighted the trend of amateur artists’ trying their hand at painting the new president. In one three-month period, 787 Obama paintings were auctioned on eBay, showing the new president in every possible pose, and a few impossible ones: standing commandingly before the White House, cradling a basketball and wearing a Washington Wizards uniform, gamely wrestling a bear on Wall Street, even flying naked on the back of a unicorn.

What is striking about these paintings is not their quality, about which the less said the better, but their consistent tone. They belong to that class of objects known as “devotional art.” Such objects are not only intended as votive offerings, to serve as the focus of veneration; the actual process of making them is itself an act of piety, a consideration that all but places them outside the realm of aesthetic judgment.

And what if Obama were to take the road which FDR took, opting away form his lack-luster Democrats, to Populist groups from the GOP? Would these icons rise again, infused with new life from the populist movements, no longer held back by the empty gesture of a false bipartisanship, and thus with increased power for the interim period of having been shelved? Here organized labor may give Obama a surge which seems unimaginable right now:

Just as Roosevelt stumbled in the early stages of his first term and then achieved the focus necessary to become the 20th century's most successful and influential president, so Obama has hit a rough patch -- not because he tried to do too much but because his programs and policies (especially with regard to health care reform) have been so compromised and ill-defined.
Like Obama today, Roosevelt took office in 1933 after a long period of conservative misrule, which had created an economic catastrophe. Elected in a landslide even greater than Obama's dramatic margin of 2008, Roosevelt also had the benefit of Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

Unfortunately, not all of the Democrats in Congress were friendly to Roosevelt or the New Deal. To an even greater extent than is the case today, the Democratic Party of the 1930s was an oil-and-water "mix.". . .

Roosevelt needed sounder allies, who shared his New Deal vision. And he found them among the progressive Republicans from the Upper Midwest and the West. . . Farmers, workers and small-business owners -- the backbone of the progressive movement -- had been soured on the Republican brand by Herbert Hoover and were beginning to vote in Democratic primaries. That meant that reactionaries were becoming increasingly dominant in the state's Republican primaries.

In 1932, right-wingers beat two key progressives in the primaries. . . As the 1934 election approached, the La Follettes left the Republican fold and [aligned with labor]. . .

[A 3- party system seemed to have formed]. . . Roosevelt. . . could have weighed in on behalf of the state's uninspired Democrats, who. . . "remained conservative and distrustful of the president." But that might have cost La Follette his Senate seat -- and the president would have lost an able congressional ally.

Roosevelt opted for ideology over partisanship, choosing to build out the left-wing coalition that would ultimately make the New Deal a muscular force and prepare the United States to defeat the fascists in World War II.

The president came to Green Bay in August 1934 to take his stand. . . . Democrats were hoping to get a ringing endorsement from their popular party leader. Instead, before a crowd of 100,000 that had gathered . . . Roosevelt hailed the state's progressive pioneers: "They set up institutions to enforce law and order, to care for the unfortunate, to promote the arts of industry and agriculture. They built a university and school system as enlightened as any that the world affords. They set up against all selfish private interests the organized authority of the people themselves through the state. They transformed utilities into public servants instead of private means of exploitation."

Source: freerepublic.com

If Obama is to be a great President and not a failed one, he must do that which FDR did: Place ideology above party politics; He must have no fear of marginalizing those who do not want his agenda, and conjure up the courage to tap into national labor of both parties, and by promising what was called by FDR a New Deal and by Obama, Change, forge a new era.

0 See all footage | View Slideshow

Share: email story | add to any | | facebook | stumbleupon