Was Maxine Waters Right?

Obama says he's not doing New Deal - what's his alternative?

Obama says he's not doing New Deal - what's his alternative?

This week, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) assailed Obama for ignoring black unemployment -- which is double the national average – and for overlooking black communities on his recent Midwest bus tour. She heard a raucous round of cheers in response.

That simply would not have happened even a year ago and this is the turnaround that should concern the Obama Administration the most right now.

During the 2008 presidential campaign members of the Congressional Black Caucus faced serious consequences for criticizing then-candidate Sen. Barack Obama. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tx.) was booed back then during an appearance in her home district by voters who felt she had attacked Obama.

Just before his inauguration as president of the United States, Time magazine ran an image of Obama wearing spectacles and a fedora with a cigarette holder dangling from his lips. It was a deliberate recasting of the iconic image of Franklin D. Roosevelt and a not-too-subtle reminder that the new president was taking office amid two wars and a financial decline – a cocktail of problems not seen since the Great Depression era.

Early on he dismissed the idea of launching a second New Deal saying that it wouldn’t be reasonable to simply import ideas from the past wholesale. But more than halfway through his term, Obama is in jeopardy of importing the worst parts of Roosevelt’s administration and ignoring many of its virtues.

During the harshest stretches of the Great Depression, unemployment topped out at 25% (and hovered around 50% for African Americans), which led to New Deal policies that aggressively shored up the financial system, created new regulations to ensure confidence in the system and directly created jobs through the Works Progress Administration.

In his first term, Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act as well as the Wagner Act, also known as the National Labor Relations Act, which greatly strengthened the ability of labor unions to engage in collective bargaining.