Try a line in the sand

Three and a half years ago, before the stock market crashed and the Great Recession began, I sat down with a group to interview then presidential candidate Barack Obama. More jobs were urgently needed, even then. The first question I asked him was, "If you are elected president, why don't you create something like an American Infrastructure Corps?" 

During the Depression of the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt saved the lives, integrity and self-respect of millions by putting them to work via something called the Works Progress Administration, WPA for short. It also immeasurably helped the country. 

Writers and artists went to work for the government, creating, among other things, a magnificent set of guides to the states and rivers that are still valuable today. Architects were hired to design fire stations and post offices and unemployed engineers built them.

The Republican Party's right-wing ideologues of the time screamed and denounced the WPA, as they undoubtedly would today. They said it was a boondoggle that paid lazy bums to lean on shovels or pretend to rake leaves all day. They said, as the Ron Pauls and Michele Bachmanns and Tea Party fakers would today, that this was — shudder — socialism. They claimed that the only legitimate jobs were those created by private enterprise.

Most people, however, knew better, even though the media back then had a heavy right-wing bias too. After three election cycles, the GOP was left with fewer than 100 congressmen.

Finally, the Republicans more or less muzzled their more rabid members and began talking about "reforming" or "fixing" New Deal programs, rather than abolishing them. Only then did they begin to win elections. I mention all this history for a good reason:

Few remember or know that any more. Evidently, that includes President Obama, who seems to have made the mistake of trying to compromise, or reason with, the Republican leadership.

That was a mistake not worthy of a man of his intelligence. There are virtually no moderates left in the congressional GOP. If they were alive, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan would be seen as left-wingers by this bunch of wing nuts.

Bob Dole, if he were still in the Senate, would be a pariah in his own party. Dole, with whom I spent a day once when he was running for president, thought there were occasions when the good of the nation took precedence over partisanship. Dole, now 88, also said in my hearing that while welfare needed reforming, the government had an obligation not to let children starve.

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