Obama like FDR? Not at all, it turns out.

Alexander Heffner, Opinion, The Washington Post:

Remember when Barack Obama was supposed to be the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt?

As the president took office, historians and columnists reveled in the comparison. Historian William E. Leuchtenburg, the author of “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal,” told NPR that he heard echoes of FDR in Obama’s inaugural address. Before that, Time magazine featured the president-elect on its cover, smiling and, FDR-like, smoking a cigarette in a 1930s roadster. “The New New Deal,” the headline proclaimed. And in the essay inside, “The New Liberal Order,” journalist Peter Beinart likened Obama’s coalition to FDR’s and posited that “if [Obama] can do what F.D.R. did — make American capitalism stabler and less savage — he will establish a Democratic majority that dominates U.S. politics for a generation.” Just like FDR.

We still don’t know exactly which former president Obama will most closely resemble. But now, after he has putcuts to Social Security on the table as part of debt negotiations with the GOP, we can finally and definitively nix Roosevelt, the liberal lion of the 20th century, from the list of parallels. Our 44th president is not a champion of liberal reform a la FDR, nor does he live in a political universe in which “bold and persistent experimentation,” as FDR promised in 1932, is even possible. Obama may turn out to be like any of his 43 predecessors — just not Roosevelt.

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