George Barack Hoover?

Yesterday, in blogging about the need to start really considering if President Barack Obama is a neoconservative, I compared him to tight-fisted Grover Cleveland.

Before, I've compared him to Jimmy Carter: someone brainy, but with the wrong type of brains, and psyche, for this job.

I see I'm not the first on this, and maybe I've not been thinking outside the box enough on presidential comparisons.

Two years ago, a Harper's article called him Barack Hoover Obama. I think the general comparison is true ... brainy but by the book, even though in pre-presidential lives, these people had operated outside the book at times.

However, there's a difference. I think Hoover, more than Obama, recognized the magnitude of the problem facing the country at that time. And, pre-FDR, there was little template for boldness.

Harper's Baker thinks at least partially along those lines:

Why was Herbert Hoover so reluctant to make the radical changes that were so clearly needed? It could not have been a question of competence or compassion for this lifelong Quaker, who had rushed sustenance to starving people around the world regardless of their nationalities or beliefs. Ultimately, Hoover could not break with the prevailing beliefs of his day. The essence of the Progressive Era in which he had come of age—the very essence of his own public image—was that government was a science. It was not a coincidence that this era brought us the very term “political science,” along with the advent of “nonpartisan” elections and “city managers” to replace mayors. ...

Progressivism aspired to be something of a political science itself, untrammeled by ideological or partisan influence: there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, and all unselfish and uncorrupted individuals could be counted on to do the right thing, once they were shown what that was.

There were plenty of progressives, led by Teddy Roosevelt, who understood that bringing real change meant fighting to bust up trusts, regain public ownership of utilities, and secure rights for labor, women, and others. But the great national effort inspired by World War I softened memories of the bitter class conflict that had characterized much of American politics since the Civil War. ...

Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life, believing as much as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenets he had believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new was required.

Obama has the the advantage of seeing that template for activist government that FDR developed. He has the advantage of much more being developed in economic policy theory in 80 years since Hoover was president.

Baker could perhaps be partially excused for writing the following two years ago, in claiming "Obama was alone" with Democrats like Max Baucus and Evan Bayh in the Senate:

Obama’s lack of direction, his lack of accomplishments in his Hundred Days and counting, cannot be attributed solely to his illusions about the august body he just vacated. Obama, like Hoover in his time, is almost alone among politicians in grasping the magnitude of the crisis. In his masterful February speech before the joint houses of Congress, Obama explained to the country why we cannot afford to continue with a tottering health-care system that has left 46 million Americans uninsured and that impedes our exports by adding, for instance, $1,500 to the cost of every GM car; why it is that climate change has to be addressed now, and how by addressing it we can regain our industrial base and actually begin to make things again; why it is that our financial system could not simply be bailed out and patched up but must be fundamentally reformed and re-regulated. Above all, he explained the necessary interaction of all these reforms, of how they were not just some liberal wish list but the actions that the radical moment demanded.

And yet ... Baker needs no forgiveness, for already then, he recognized the reality of Barack Obama:

Speeches almost as powerful have followed, always linking these ideas together. But, like Hoover, Obama has been unable to make his actions live up to his words. Health care is being gummed to death on Capitol Hill. Obama has done nothing to pass “card check” provisions that would facilitate union organization and quietly announced that he would not seek stronger labor and environmental protections in NAFTA. He has capitulated on cap-and-trade in the budget outline and never even bothered to push for an actual carbon tax. Only minuscule portions of the stimulus bill or his budget proposals were dedicated to mass transit, and his indifference to the issue—what must be a major component of any serious effort to go green—was reflected in his appointment of a mediocre Republican time-server, Ray LaHood, as his transportation secretary.

Still worse is Obama’s decision to leave the reordering of the financial world solely to Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner. ... Just as Herbert Hoover could not, in the end, break away from the best economic advice of the 1920s, Barack Obama is sticking with the “key men” of the 1990s. ...

No doubt, President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would claim that by practicing “the art of the possible,” they are ensuring that “the perfect does not become the enemy of the good.” But by not even proposing the relevant legislation, Obama has ceded a key part of the process—so much so that his retreat seems not so much tactical as a reversion to his core political beliefs.

Of course, the reality is that Emanuel was and is as much a "time server" as LaHood. And, appointed by the same man.

And so Obama chooses to be "incremental" in change. Or, not even wanting real "change" in fiscal and economic policy, whether on taxation, regulation, or other issues.

Or, per Baker, in addition to Obama believing his own myth, he believes myth about Bill Clinton, too:

Just as Herbert Hoover came to internalize the “business progressivism” of his era as a welcome alternative to the futile, counterproductive conflicts of an earlier time, so has Obama internalized what might be called Clinton’s “business liberalism” as an alternative to useless battles from another time—battles that liberals, in any case, tended to lose. Clinton’s business liberalism, however, is a chimera, every bit as much a capitulation to powerful and selfish interests as was Hoover’s 1920s progressivism.

Clinton was the author of his own myth here. His claim that he was ignorant of how his whole "program" was going to be hostage to the bond market because of its worries about the national debt rang hollow even then, when one realizes how closely he palled around with financier Jackson Stephens when Slick Willie was governor of Arkansas.

So, in that sense, it's not fair to compare Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama. It's not fair to Hoover.

First, Calvin Coolidge never told whoppers like Clinton did to inflate his myth. Second, Hoover never would have believed them, anyway. Third, Hoover never wrote up his own myth, let alone inflicted it on a largely unwitting electorate.

Picture if Harry Truman had promised to veto Taft-Hartley, then backed off that promise after the House of Morgan gave him a secret slush fund, and you get the idea of where today's national Democratic leadership is at.