Walter Russell Mead takes us back about 80 years:

Hoover was the child of a broken home with an unconventional background. He was far more widely traveled than most Americans in his day, and his time overseas made him a globalist in his thinking in many ways. His wife (Lou Henry Hoover) was unusually well educated and assertive — at a time when few women went to college, she graduated from coeducational Stanford with a degree in geology.

Hoover was an unconventional candidate who came into office on a tidal wave of support…Hoover was the great progressive hope of his day — he had supported Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose campaign and was seen as much more forward looking and progressive than the party machine…

Hoover’s running mate, Kaw nation member Charles Curtis, was the first Native American and the first American with significant non-European ancestry to serve as Vice President of the United States. Hoover continued to burnish his diversity credentials in the White House; he was the first president since Theodore Roosevelt to invite an African American to a White House dinner and he wanted progress on Native American issues to be a hallmark of his administration…

Hoover…was a strong supporter of disarmament, focusing on naval buildups as the greatest danger of the day. He began the withdrawal of US forces his predecessors had committed in Haiti and Nicaragua, hoping to push the reset button on US relations with Latin America. He sought to avoid confrontational US statements and to downplay possible grounds for conflict. His strong humanitarian instincts (he had led efforts to relieve starving Europeans during and after World War One) made him reluctant to use force but also left him concerned about the well being of people in other countries…

despite his long record of progressive politics, his personal appeal and his sympathy for the downtrodden, President Hoover is best remembered for failing to master the Great Depression. Six months into his term, the stock market crashed; for the next three and a half years the economy continued to deteriorate. By the time of the 1932 presidential election, Hoover was so widely discredited in the minds of shell shocked voters that Franklin D. Roosevelt swept into office…

The problem was not that Hoover didn’t try…The economy was suffering from a combination of domestic and international maladies that were not well understood at the time — at least not by the President and his closest advisers…As the political situation worsened and the panic grew, bad ideas…became harder to resist. Misguided monetary policy at the Fed made things worse, and as the opposition party gained strength, Hoover gradually lost the authority to lead.

Despite, or probably because of, the catastrophe of letting Lehman Brothers fail, Democrats and Republicans woke up in time in 2008 to avoid allowing the total collapse of the banking system — the folly that turned a bad recession into the Great Depression.  

Regrettably, the last three years have been pretty much a total waste. Once again, “the economy is suffering from a combination of domestic and international maladies that are not well understood — at least not by the President and his closest advisers.” The solutions to the problem are straightforward, and anyone who has relevant experience can see many of them clearly. Alas, relevant experience is sorely lacking among those currently running the show.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 9:45 am and is filed under business, China, Democrats, EU, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.