Barack Obama, meet Herbert Hoover… There is a lot more resemblance between the über-old-white-dead president and the hip, urbane Democratic candidate from the cover of GQ than meets the eye.
     Both of them have the very important trait of being unable to stare an unpleasant fact in the face.
     While Hoover was president, years of margin buying on the stock exchange began to catch up with investors. In those days you could buy a dollar’s worth of some stocks for as little as 10 cents down. The 90 cents you didn’t pay was the margin. For reasons that economists are still trying to figure out, but which include the fall of the far-off Austrian schilling and the effects of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, the people selling the stocks needed their 90 cents. Now. All at once.
      People who thought they had, say, a portfolio worth $1,000 (which was a lot of money in 1929), discovered that instead, they owed $900. People were forced to liquidate their savings, sell their businesses, their houses and their personal possessions to pay off these debts. So many businesses closed and downsized that a full third of the labor force lost their jobs.

     In those days there was no welfare safety net... There was the “dole,” which could be the state or the city or a church group passing out bread or coal to the needy. Al Capone opened a string of soup kitchens. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Al Capone was doing more to materially help poor people than Herbert Hoover.
     Hoover starved the people to death over a principle. Principles matter, but hungry bellies matter more. Hoover believed that a welfare state would corrupt the character of the country, devalue work, and encourage idleness. Ironically, he was a hero in Europe, where he spearheaded Belgian relief after the Great War. There was nothing wrong with eroding Belgian character, but he would not do it to Americans.

     So instead of offering relief, Hoover offered encouragement. “Prosperity is just around the corner,” Hoover said. With all the grass growing in the streets you couldn’t even see the corner. “The fundamental economic basis of this country is sound,” Hoover averred. The only sound was of children crying with hunger.
     Hoover, the chief executive of the United States, pronounced himself unable, as a matter of principle, to address the crisis: “Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body - the producers and consumers themselves.”
     And it was that quote which reminded me of something Barack Obama said a few days ago.

     Let me preface this by saying that Obama was trying to be factual… In Springfield, Missouri, Obama said, "Making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing, but we could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups…. You could actually save just as much."
     Wow. There is an estimated 1.6 trillion gallons of oil to be had in the Outer Continental Shelf. That number, written out, is 1,600,000,000,000 gallons. That is the oil supply the Republicans want to drill. Is that how much we are wasting by riding on soft tires in a year? Or six years? Or 50 years?
     According to the U.S. Department of Energy, if cold tire pressure is adjusted to specification on all cars, we would effect a 3.3 percent savings of fuel. Our total gasoline consumption in a year is 142.3 billion gallons, according to the DOE; so Obama is wrong about the amount saved, but not about that fact that gasoline would be conserved.

     But here’s the problem... Checking your tire pressure is not going to roll back gasoline prices from $4 a gallon back to $2.50 or even $3.50. Being told that Prosperity is just around the corner (like wind and solar power) is hopeful and encouraging. Being given something we can do to save a buck is a nice gesture.
     Unfortunately, encouragement, gestures, bromides, helpful hints and principled stands that fly in the face of the overwhelming will of the people don’t get the job done. In order to get out of the Depression, America had to take a big gamble and let Franklin D. Roosevelt essentially rebuild the structure of American society from the ground up.
     The Republicans are asking for something much less risky. They are simply asking to drill holes in the ground. What principle is it that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid hold to be more sacred than the well being of working Americans?
     Herbert Hoover did a century’s worth of damage to the Republican Party by his insistence on the principle of “rugged individualism.” Are the Democrats willing to sacrifice the White House and destroy their party for the benefit of the Greenland ice cap and the beach residents of Santa Monica?