Gorbachev, Not FDR

Richard Miniter makes an astute analogy in his Forbes column this week:

Like it or not, Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev: a man forced to preside over the demise of a political system he desperately wants to save.

While the thrust of his column is why the Democrats are doomed, the more pertinent observation is that, like Gorbachev, Obama sits atop a government whose primary function has become that of satisfying a coalition of rent-seekers -- unions, investment bankers, ethanol producers, government workers, welfare parasites -- who in turn sustain the power of the governors (in the USSR these were the Communist Party officials; in the US these are the "elites" in Congress, media and academia). Like Obama, Gorbachev instinctively and desperately wanted to maintain the system that had so rewarded him throughout his career. But such a system is simply economically unsustainable, You can't keep diverting ever more resources from the economically productive to the economically unproductive without crippling the drivers of economic growth.

The silver lining of the Great Recession is that it brought to sudden light the terminal nature of this arrangement. The Tea Parties, the 2010 election, the great debt-ceiling debate are all evidence that the light bulb is finally going off over people's heads (the rent-seekers are especially fearful). The question that remains is whether Obama's own perestroika will hold for awhile or whether he, like Gorbachev, will be swept away by the realities of economics.