Its one week before the inauguration. What were FDR and his “Brain Trust” doing at this point in time — a week before March 4, 1933?
And how does that compare to the Obama transition? The Obama transition is really impressing me right now compared to Roosevelt’s transition. Roosevelt had a “Brain Trust” during the campaign that was working on policy ideas, and this continued after the election. There were definitely a lot of ideas floating around, but in early ’33, the New Deal was still very undefined. So, we had some general sense of various things he talked about during the campaign, but some of them were in conflict: The idea of cutting spending tremendously but also trying to help the people that had been injured by the Depression. Doing something about the crisis in the farm belt, but we didn’t know what. So the story of FDR’s first hundred days is really the attempt to put some meat on the bones of the New Deal. The infighting, the ideological conflicts [meant that] by this time in 1933, much was up in the air. I think we are seeing more clarity from Obama. We’re seeing him talking before he takes the oath of
