I don't want to go negative on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he didn't pass an economic deal in the first 100 days. We have passed the largest Recovery Act in the history of the country.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think back a little bit when President Bush was elected President and what kind of economy he inherited from the Clinton administration. The economy was going down. It was not doing well.
But despite historic levels of obstruction, President Obama was able to bring the economy back from the verge of a second Great Depression.
The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis.
Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back.
We have to change course. And we have to do so now. That is why I worked with my colleagues in Washington to pass the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn't done in one stroke, and it wasn't done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of '33, '34, '35, '37, '39, and '41.
We own the economy. We own the beginning of the turnaround and we want to make sure that we continue that pace of recovery, not go back to the policies of the past under the Bush administration that put us in the ditch in the first place.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.
But no one can praise Roosevelt for doing this and then insist that he restored our traditional political and economic systems to their former vitality.
By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.