“Hooverizing” Bush (FDRizing Obama)

Jonathan Martin, who writes at “Politico,” has pointed out that Democrats running for governor this fall in both New Jersey and Virginia are seeking to plant George Bush on the backs of their Republican opponents. As Martin puts it,

Bush isn't the first former president whose name has served as a rallying cry for the opposition. Democrats milked Herbert Hoover and the specter of "Hoovervilles" for decades following FDR's 1932 election.

November elections in New Jersey and Virginia will show how well it works to continue running against Bush, months after he has left office. I myself wrote Bush was in danger of becoming Herbert Hoover to Obama’s FDR.

Here’s the big factual difference, no matter how successful Democrats are in Hooverizing Bush. The Great Depression clobbered Hoover in his 7th month in office (October 1929), and he lived with it for the next 41. By the time Roosevelt took over in March 1933, Hoover personified government’s inability to get us out of trouble. Then Roosevelt came in and things immediately got better.

As James Pinkerton, a FOX News Channel contributor, described it:

By January 1934, less than a year after Roosevelt took office, the Civil Works Administration employed 4.25 million people, fully eight percent of the national labor force. In fact, over the entire course of the the Depression, unemployment peaked in the month that Roosevelt came into office. [emphasis added]

And as we know, Obama’s job loss figures continue to grow.

Bush left when the Great Recession (not the one that statistically began in December 2007; the one that followed Lehman Brothers’ collapse September 16, 2008) was in its 4th month. Bush was there for the beginning, but then got out. Four months, even 13 months, is not Hoover's nearly four years.

Obama promised the economic turn-around would come with his stimulus package (I think he rushed the stimulus package through Congress because he wanted credit for a cyclical recovery he believed was inevitable). The stimulus promises make it Obama’s economy now, not Hoover's, er Bush's.