Monday, December 05, 2016

Trump is FDR with the fireside tweet

Trump is FDR with the fireside tweet: Glenn Reynolds
"Democrats think caring means a government program. 
Trump thinks caring is getting to keep your job, just as he promised.
President Clinton said, “I feel your pain.”
President Franklin Roosevelt had "fireside chats.”
And now President-elect Donald Trump is reaching out to forgotten Americans with a message that he cares about their problems, and wants to help.
Image result for trump fireside tweetsThis could be the Democrats’ worst nightmare.
As Walter Russell Mead notes in The American Interest, it’s an old style of politicking that more recent politicos seem to have forgotten. 
Trump’s Carrier event saved only a tiny fraction of jobs that are being lost around the country, and it might not make much difference in the long run, but that wasn’t the point.
The point was “that the people at the top are aware of the problems of the people at the bottom," Mead writes.
"It’s smart governance, but it’s something that the technocratic progressive mind tends to undervalue.”
...Trump, by contrast, promised to save Carrier jobs during the campaign and then, even though Obama mocked him for it at the PBS town hall (“What are you going to do? ... What magic wand do you have?”) 
Trump then went ahead and delivered.
A conspicuously kept campaign promise that benefits the little guy sends a signal of caring that talk of macroeconomics does not.
FDR knew this.
His New Deal economic policies were mostly snake oil — according to a study by UCLA economists, they actually prolonged the Great Depression by seven years.
But FDR made people feel like he cared, even though he was a rich man from New York who had never been poor himself.
Now another rich man from New York seems to be repeating the formula. 
FDR gave the Democrats two decades of political dominance.
Today’s Democrats should be worrying that Trump could do the same for the Republican Party."

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