A bad deal revisited.(Correction, Please!)(Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan and Franklin Roosevelt's 'New Deal' )

ITEM: Writing for Newsweek's online edition on January 13, Daniel Gross complains: "Even before President-elect Obama takes office, critics are circling his yet-to-be-released stimulus plan." The most "emphatic objections come from conservatives, who question the utility of deploying old-fashioned fiscal stimulus ... [to] boost demand and right the economy."

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Gross primarily singles out those with "ideological" objections. "Amity Shlaes, George Will, and assorted libertarians cling bitterly to the notion that the New Deal didn't work, that FDR's policies of regulatory reform and sharply increased government spending were an abject failure, that the economy didn't turn around until the day Japanese bombers dropped their payloads on Pearl Harbor. They believe Keynesian-style stimulus didn't work in the 1930s, so it won't work now."

ITEM: The New York Times for January 12, in a article entitled, "In Emphasis on Economy, Obama Looks to History," reports of the incoming president: "His aides said Mr. Obama had studied the way Franklin D. Roosevelt approached the first 100 days of his presidency, and in particular had seized on the notion of Roosevelt having a 'conversation with the American public' to try to prepare it for a difficult time. He has, aides said, even looked at the words Roosevelt used and the tone he struck. Mr. Obama has sought to strike a balance: emphasizing the depth of the problem, to create a sense of political urgency for Congress to act quickly, while not being so pessimistic that he could further destabilize the jittery financial markets or deplete the sense of energy and hope accompanying his election."

CORRECTION: The theme of this script has already been written, and some of the rehearsals have already been held. Barack Hussein Obama is to play Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the New New Deal. George Bush gets to be Herbert Hoover. Obama himself has drawn the parallels on numerous occasions, which have been echoed repeatedly in the media--both favorably, by liberal supporters, and unfavorably, by those who dread the harm it could do to the country. Time magazine even Photoshopped Obama as Roosevelt on its cover, showing him clinching an FDR-style cigarette holder in his teeth in the jaunty attitude of the famous original.

To support the revival of the New Deal requires some very selective views of what it meant the first time around. In so doing, many of the leftists who dominate the mainstream media and much of academia have to bend the truth and rewrite the history.

The myth in a nutshell is that FDR was elected in 1932 after the free market failed in the United States. He quickly heartened the country with his speeches and brilliant, far-reaching New Deal policies that jump-started the economy--putting America back to work and ending the Great Depression.