The ghost of FDR

An acquaintance of mine recently expressed concern over what it's going to take to wake up millions of Americans who still appear to be hung over from an excess of Obama-Aid. I share his concern, and have been unimpressed with the constant drumbeat about Barack Obama's "rapidly declining" poll numbers.

Maybe I've been living on a different planet, but it seems to me that Der Fuhrbama's approval ratings have been gently moving back and forth between the low and high 40s for as long as I can remember. Nothing he does, no matter how anti-constitutional, how criminal or how arrogant, seems to faze 40-plus percent of the population.

I understand the roughly 30 percent who want the United States to become a hard-core socialist nation. They have a sincere desire to redistribute wealth and live under an all-powerful central government. I get it. They're a visible enemy, and you're conscious of the fact that you have to push back against them day in and day out.

But the other 10-15 percent – those who don't want to live under a socialist regime, yet still approve of the job BHO is doing – are the ones who have head-scratchers like myself so puzzled. Do they ever watch anything but sports and "Ice Road Truckers" on television? Do they ever read nonfiction adult books or watch Fox News? Are their legs hopelessly trapped in an irreversible tingling mode caused by the realization that an African-American is living in the White House? Are they simply not able to get over it?

What you've learned about FDR isn't true! Discover how his tenure seriously harmed the nation in "New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America"

Yet, if you think about the nonstop illegalities that went on when Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a chokehold on the U.S. economy, Obama's strong poll numbers should not be that surprising. In rereading Amity Shlaes' "The Forgotten Man," I was again reminded of the eerie similarities between the modi operandi of FDR and Barack Obama – so much so that BHO could pass as the ghost of FDR.

One cannot help but draw the conclusion that Obama must have studied the FDR playbook carefully, because he came out of the starting gate seemingly determined to follow Roosevelt's progressive strategy to a T. Like FDR, Obama is a truly licentious creature, totally devoid of ethics and harboring a complete disregard for the law, the wishes of the electorate, the Constitution and the natural rights of man.

From his creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority under David Lilienthal to his attempt to pack the Supreme Court with an additional (and more liberal) number of judges, FDR sincerely believed the Constitution was an outdated document.

There is one section, in particular, in "The Forgotten Man" that reminded me of the current-day antics (health care, cap-and-trade, financial regulation, etc.) of Barack Obama. Early on, through the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was signed into law in 1933, FDR basically threw out the Constitution and engaged in a Herculean effort to force his will and progressive ideas on the American people.

Fortunately, in a landmark case in 1935, Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Title I of the Act was unconstitutional, and the Act was trashed shortly thereafter.

In her book, Shlaes quotes Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes on the unanimous verdict in the Schechter case: "Extraordinary conditions (the Great Depression) may call for extraordinary remedies. But the argument necessarily falls short of an attempt to justify action which lies outside the sphere of constitutional power." He went on to say that the National Recovery Administration, which administered and enforced the Act, had resorted to "coercive exercise of the law-making power."

Further, Justice Louis Brandeis told Tommy Corcoran and Ben Cohen, the two attorneys who had been the key legal advisers on FDR's New Deal, "This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we're not going to let this government centralize everything. It's come to an end."

In reference to the Supreme Court decision, Sen. William Borah of Idaho spelled it out clearly when he said, "We live under a written Constitution … fortunate or unfortunate, it is a fact." What a novel thought.

BHO's own public disdain for the Supreme Court can be traced back to FDR, who gave many a tongue-lashing to members of the highest court in the land. After the court shattered his grandiose plans to have the NRA stalk businesses nationwide under a phony stretch of the Interstate Commerce Clause (the same stretch used to pass Obamacare), FDR stated that by refusing to interpret the Commerce Clause in a way that would give him and his fellow New Dealers the police-state powers they desired, they were taking the country back to "the horse-and-buggy age."

Now, here's the scary part when thinking about BHO and his New New Deal: FDR, after a disastrous first term, was re-elected anyway! And after four more years of the Great Depression, he was re-elected for an unprecedented third term … then, finally, a fourth!

When he mercifully croaked in 1945, he left, as his legacy to the nation, a fraudulent, anti-constitutional Social Security program, an anti-prosperity tax structure and a solid foundation for a genuine welfare state that would grow out of control each year until it finally began to collapse early in the next century.

So, yes, it does give one cause for concern that Barack Obama, master of the silver-tongued lie, could conceivably be re-elected by a coalition of true-believing socialists, hard-core false-prosperity addicts and those with irreversible damage caused by one too many leg-tingling episodes.

Which is why all liberty lovers should be focused on vigilance rather than overconfidence in the upcoming elections. Never underestimate the enemy! Remember, they have no qualms about lying, cheating, bribing, deceiving and using violence, all of which come in very handy during election time.