Is President Obama channeling Herbert Hoover?

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Friday July 08, 2011 · 2:53 AM PDT

2011/07/08 · 02:53

This may sound like a weird question. Yet as I read Paul Krugman's op-ed What Obama Wants I couldn't help but ask the question. The thought was triggered by the sentence

In his (President Obama's) brief remarks after Thursday’s meeting, by the way, Mr. Obama seemed to reiterate the Herbert Hooveresque view that deficit reduction is what we need to “grow the economy.

Earlier Krugman writes

But let’s be frank. It’s getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right. In fact, if all you did was listen to his speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the G.O.P.’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it. And maybe that’s not a false impression; maybe it’s the simple truth.
One striking example of this rightward shift came in last weekend’s presidential address, in which Mr. Obama had this to say about the economics of the budget: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.”

That’s three of the right’s favorite economic fallacies in just two sentences.

Several here have argued the President Obama is right of center. While he is not a wing nut, President Obama is slowly drifting more to the right. The question becomes what do we do?

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