In the guise of stimulating recovery, Obama is building "secular socialist machine" patterned after Roosevelt's New Deal

Students of history will recognize the method to President Obama's madness. The parallels in both policy and politics to the Roosevelt Administration are too striking not to be deliberate. President Obama is consciously modeling his Administration on the Roosevelt Administration. But just as the liberals of the 1930s graduated to the New Left of the 1960s, President Obama's policies and politics transcend the liberalism of the 1930s. He is building what Newt Gingrich rightly calls a secular socialist machine in his new book To Save America.

Roosevelt's Keynesian economics was left for dead in the 1980s with President Reagan's supply-side revolution miraculously ending the stagflation of the 1970s with a 25-year economic boom. But President Obama came into office talking as if that never happened, casting it down the memory hole. While Reagan's early 1981 budget cuts slashed the federal budget by about 5%, Obama rammed through an almost $1 trillion stimulus package of nearly all Keynesian economics from the 1930s, laughing at his astounded critics with the question, "What do you think a stimulus is?"

Economically, it didn't work, just as it didn't in the 1930s or the 1970s. Now 29 months after the recession officially started in December, 2007, unemployment is 10% and rising, and the stock market is again stumbling, with the Dow still 4000 points off its last highs. The recovery was overdue a year ago, and even now economic growth is not half what it should be.

But note how the stimulus spending was structured so that more is spent this year than last. Was the goal to reduce unemployment as quickly as possible, or to use the guise of Keynesian stimulus spending for a political slush fund to buy as many votes as possible in this political year? Note also that about half of the direct "stimulus" spending went to state and local governments to prop up the employment of public employees, the most reliable supporters of liberal Democrat candidates. The only thing President Obama's stimulus is stimulating is a left-wing Democrat political machine.