A Tale of Two Fine Roosevelts
The Age of Reagan is over. Obama and McCain should recall the cousins who took on Wall Street panics and won.
Sean Wilentz
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Oct 27, 2008
The traumatic financial crisis has emphatically ended the political age of Ronald Reagan. For more than 30 years, conservative ideas about small government and the unfettered free markets set the tone of American politics and government. Government, Reagan said, had become the problem and not the solution. His conservative Republican successors took the dogma of deregulation and regressive tax cuts to its logical conclusion, in line with former House majority leader Dick Armey's axiom: "The market is rational and the government is dumb." But today, amid what Republicans and Democrats agree is the worst financial catastrophe since the Great Depression, government has become the solution again—the only conceivable one—and it seems that it will remain so for a long time to come.