Rick Perry Embraces New Deal Revisionism

Jonathan Chait
Senior Editor


Rick Perry, in his anti-Obama spiel, drops in some interesting New Deal revisionism:

“What’s dumb is to oversee an economy that has lost that many millions of jobs, to put unemployment numbers that over his four years will stay probably at 9 percent, to downgrade the credit of this good country, to put fiscal policies in place that were a disaster back in the '30s and to try them again in the 2000s,” Perry said on Sean Hannity’s radio show. “That’s what I consider to be the definition of dumb.”
The previously-marginal notion that Franklin Roosevelt worsened the Depression has rapidly hardened into conventional wisdom within the vanguard of the conservative movement. (In 2009, I wrote a review essay about the phenomenon.) But it's remained largely hidden from the political stage. My suspicion is that most Americans consider the New Deal a great success, and Franklin Roosevelt a great president. Indeed, the full political force of the conservative backlash has mobilized the belief that President Obama is taking away good, earned benefits from middle-class Americans and giving them to the undeserving poor.

I could see why this would put Perry in good stead with conservative Republican activists. But does he really want to run in the general election against Obama as Roosevelt?