Now that Obama is poised to do a very modest "new deal" for America, the knives are out and the right wingers want to stop any "handouts" to the poor, the unemployed, the under-employed. (Obviously trillion dollar handouts are meant to be reserved for the truly deserving, the Wall Street billionaires and multi-millionaires who ran rampant under Bush and have destroyed the economy.)
So... the NY Times has an article that describes the long history of attacking FDR and the New Deal and how this is the latest strategy by the right wingers to undermine Obama even before he gets his stimulus package to Congress. Here are some tidbits from an article by Adam Cohen entitled "Republican's Latest Talking Point: The New Deal Failed":
Conservatives have railed against the New Deal from the start. In 1934, H. L. Mencken was already decrying it as “a saturnalia of expropriation and waste.” When F.D.R. ran for re-election in 1936, a headline in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers insisted that “Moscow Backs Roosevelt.”
But Americans were not fooled. They knew F.D.R. was on their side in a way that Herbert Hoover and his fellow free-marketers hadn’t been. They could see first-hand the good that Roosevelt’s jobs programs were doing for the Depression’s victims and the slow but unmistakable improvements in the economy.
In the 1934 midterm elections, the voters delivered their first verdict on the New Deal, expanding the Democrats’ margins in Congress. In 1936, F.D.R. won in a bigger landslide than he had four years earlier. By 1940, the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie, was supporting much of Roosevelt’s social welfare and regulatory regime.
...
Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama’s stimulus will cost too much, and that over time the economy will cure itself. When critics raised the same objections to F.D.R.’s programs, his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, had a ready answer: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”
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