Obama's historic moment

SINCE HIS election, Barack Obama has hit the ground running. He doesn't have much of a choice, either.

With the war on terror, an almost trillion-dollar budget deficit, rising unemployment and impending crises in the housing, health-care and auto industries, the challenge confronting him compares only to those faced by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression and Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.

While FDR and Reagan faced their challenges by establishing enduring legacies tied to their respective liberal Democratic and conservative Republican platforms, Obama must reach across the partisan divide as well as the ideological gaps within his own party if he hopes to succeed.

Historians often point to cycles of liberalism and conservatism in our nation's past to anticipate the arrival of a watershed in U.S. political culture. These cycles bring to the forefront a president who ushers in a period of substantive political, social and economic change to meet the needs and interests of the American people, usually during a serious economic or international crisis.

FDR's New Deal of the 1930s represents such a watershed. Confronted with the Great Depression, Roosevelt created a liberal tradition that radically increased the role of the federal government in the economy, restored Americans' confidence in government and established a framework for a welfare state.

Over the next four decades, all of Roosevelt's successors, Democratic and Republican, were forced to operate within that liberal agenda because of FDR's institutional legacy and the dominance of the Democratic Party in Congress, which preserved it.

Similarly, when Reagan came to the presidency in 1981, he faced double-digit inflation, soaring unemployment and a frigid cold war. He implemented a conservative GOP agenda that stressed trickle-down economics, large reductions in domestic programs, substantial tax cuts for business and greater defense spending.

In the process, he brought greater prosperity to corporate America, ended the cold war and established a conservative legacy for his successors, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

President-elect Obama also stands at the precipice of historical change and not just because he'll be the first African-American in the White House. Like FDR and Reagan, he can reinvent the federal government by establishing an institutional framework for domestic and foreign policy that can resolve the many crises this country faces.

But the president-elect doesn't have the luxury of holding the party line, and he realizes that.

Over the course of his campaign, Obama adapted his platform to some of the same policies outlined by his Republican opponent, John McCain.

WHILE HE captured national attention by opposing the Iraq war and pushing a short-term phased withdrawal, Obama later acknowledged the "need for an on-going presence of U.S. troops" in the Mideast to combat terror.

When criticized for the switch, he admitted it was a matter of "pragmatism" that convinced him of the need for a "return to the traditional, bipartisan, realistic foreign policy of George Bush Sr. and Ronald Reagan."

Similarly, Obama's energy policy initially opposed the idea of offshore drilling and tapping the nation's emergency oil stockpile to relieve high prices. But like McCain, he now supports both measures as "short-term solutions" to ending U.S. reliance on oil from the Middle East.

Nor is Obama's solution to the current economic meltdown that different from McCain's. While Democratic liberals on Capitol Hill are campaigning for a policy of tax and spend to bail out Wall Street, Obama realizes he can't go that route and has committed himself to tighter regulations on the financial industry.

Since being elected, Obama has moved quickly to mend differences with McCain, and Hillary Clinton, his apparent candidate for secretary of state. He's also established an advisory panel to oversee appointments to his Cabinet with instructions to "draw on the widest possible pool of expertise, regardless of partisan affiliation."

Thus far, Obama refuses to be a prisoner of party ideology, admitting that he' be "happy to adopt ideas that work, whether they come from FDR or Reagan."

Perhaps he appreciates the reality that the war on terror and the nation's economic welfare aren't matters of liberal or conservative ideology or Democratic and Republican politics.

They're matters of sheer survival. *

William Kashatus can be contacted at bill@historylive.net.