Commentary
by: Denis Murphy
February 12, 2012
Three years ago former US President Bill Clinton wrote
an article in Time Magazine
(June 24, 2009) advising
newly elected President Barack Obama to follow the priorities of America’s
Depression era President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Whether Obama followed the
advice or not, the readers can judge for themselves. May I suggest that the
advice Clinton offered Obama may also be of use to President Aquino.
At the beginning of the article, Clinton talks of the bond
Roosevelt created between the ordinary working men and women and himself.
“My grandfather was a dirt farmer with only a sixth-grade
education. During the Depression, he eked out a living selling blocks of ice.
But in those days, even though he was poor, he knew someone special: from
listening to the fireside chats on the radio, he knew Franklin
Roosevelt. And he believed that Roosevelt knew what his life was like – and
cared about it too.
“I grew up listening to my grandfather’s tales of what it was like
to live through the Depression and the war and what Roosevelt meant to him.
When I was President, in another time of change and uncertainty, I often looked
at the portrait of FDR in the Roosevelt Room and remembered my grandfather’s
stories. Roosevelt had a deep personal connection to ordinary citizens.”
When Roosevelt died in 1945, ordinary people in tears lined the
railroad tracks that led back to his home in Hyde Park, New York to watch the
train carrying his body pass by.
I have only one personal memory of President Roosevelt. On a cold and overcast day
many years ago in the Bronx, we were playing in the Church schoolyard when
someone shouted, “The President’s coming down the Concourse (the main road of
the Bronx).” We ran up the hill just in time to see the flashing lights of
motorcycles and police cars coming toward us. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been our president all our lives, but we had never
seen him. We heard cheering, but it rose and fell in a strange way. The car
came slowly because the president was campaigning. Then it was in front of us.
We pushed toward the car and had a good look at the old man inside. He looked
much older than his pictures in the papers or newsreels. His face was drawn and
gray and he sat back in the chair like a man on his sick bed, all alone in the
back seat of the limousine. We waved and shouted. He seemed to see our group
and he waved at us. Even as young boys we knew he was dying. People had grown
silent along the way when they saw how sick he looked.
Clinton claims Roosevelt “got the big things right.” When he came
into office during the Depression, he saw that the ills of the country could
not be addressed without more aggressive involvement by the government. He ran for president as a fiscal
conservative, promising to balance the budget. But unlike his predecessor, he
quickly realized that, with prices collapsing and unemployment exploding, only
the federal government could step into the breach and restart the economy.
Clinton recalls that Roosevelt surrounded himself with brilliant
people, people who may have been far smarter than he was himself. He quotes
Oliver Wendell Holmes to remind us that sheer intellectual brilliance is not
everything: “Roosevelt had a second-class mind, but a first-class temperament.”
This gave Roosevelt, Clinton says, the power to inspire others with his passion
and to form a team that could work together.
Finally, according to Clinton, Roosevelt had the confidence to
give up on projects that weren’t working, admit his failure and begin in
another direction. He believed in experimentation, but he didn’t deny the
evidence of failure when it came in. A president, claims Clinton, needs an appetite for
experimentation and the determination to keep what works and scrap what
doesn’t.
Do these suggestions of Bill Clinton have some usefulness for
President Aquino?
Can and should President Aquino follow Roosevelt’s example and
bond closely with the ordinary poor and middle-class people of the country?
Should he build his political power base, as Roosevelt did, on this union of
ordinary people and the president? Is there any other firm foundation for
President Aquino on which to build? Will the poor and middle-class support give
him the ability to make the basic reforms needed in the country? Will such a
union allow him to escape from the limitations of our elite-dominated
bureaucracy?
Has President Aquino decided on all the “big things” that must be
done in his term of office? It’s clear he wants to eliminate corruption. What
else are his goals? After corruption, what are the next three crucial things
that need to be done?
Has the present government experimented sufficiently with new
solutions? Have we taken a fresh look at old problems in the hope of finding
new workable solutions? Perhaps we should be more creative. There are no magic
formulas, but new situations call for at least a look at new solutions.
Finally, does the President have the most qualified and unified
staff possible? Even ordinary people now talk about political skirmishes inside
the administration’s top people. This isn’t supposed to happen in a
presidential system of government where the President is free to choose the
staff he wants.
Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933 which was a
grim time for his country.
Unemployment had reached 33 percent. Hoovervilles, the settlements
of the poor and unemployed were, like our urban poor areas, growing everywhere.
They were named scornfully after former President Herbert Hoover. Farmers like the
Jody family of “Grapes of Wrath” lost their land to bad weather and venal
banks. A popular song of the day was “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?”
Roosevelt’s portrait is fittingly on the dime coin now as if to remind us he
gave the poor what they most needed, that is, his comradeship.
Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates.
