In today’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger writes about the similarities between President Obama’s campaign message and that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection message. Henninger argues that Obama won’t be nearly so successful as FDR was in championing a big government agenda of heavy regulation and income redistribution because, being “a pretty grim guy,” Obama lacks FDR’s “natural personal buoyancy.”  That’s certainly true. But an even more important difference is that, in 1936, FDR presided over perhaps the greatest year of peacetime economic growth in American history, while Obama has presided over by far the worst “recovery” from a lengthy recession in the past six decades.  

According to the Obama administration’s own Bureau of Economic Analysis (see “Percent change from preceding period”), real (inflation-adjusted) growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) was a whopping 13.1 percent in 1936. (In 1938, real GDP growth hit minus-3.4 percent, as America plunged into the second deep trough of the Great Depression, but by then FDR’s reelection had long since been secured.)  To put that 13.1 percent tally into perspective, the finest year of real GDP growth in the past half-century was in 1984, when real GDP growth hit 7.2 percent under Ronald Reagan. No wonder FDR won reelection in 1936 in a landslide.