In the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency we were told that he was the reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Time magazine even ran the cover below in which Obama’s face was Photoshopped onto FDR’s body.
Then the American people rejected the Obama agenda in the 2010 elections, so the Democrats cooked up a new tale for public consumption: Obama is Reaganesque. He was photographed carrying a Reagan bio. The media called his State of the Union address “absolutely Reaganesque.”
Now it turns out that it was Roosevelt who was absolutely Reaganesque, especially when it came to public employee unions.
RealClearPolitics.com lets FDR explain it in his own words:
Roosevelt’s reign certainly was the bright dawn of modern unionism. The legal and administrative paths that led to 35% of the nation’s workforce eventually unionizing by a mid-1950s peak were laid by Roosevelt.
But only for the private sector. Roosevelt openly opposed bargaining rights for government unions.
“The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees. Yes, public workers may demand fair treatment, wrote Roosevelt. But, he wrote, “I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place” in the public sector. “A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government.”
So FDR, reviled by conservatives as the father of socialist America, sounds a lot more conservative, a lot more like Ronald Reagan than Barack Obama does.
We’ll let you decide who Obama sounds like.
(Hint: Lenin)
Source: RealClearPolitics.com
