Roosevelt understood it: Don’t lose control of the debate

When Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to spend $50 billion ($700 billion in today’s dollars) to help the nations fighting Hitler while his country was still not at war, he made certain he, and not his political enemies, controlled the message, something the Obama administration has neglected to do in the health-care battle.

The Roosevelt message was highly controversial. It would take those billions from a Depression-weary nation, send the money overseas and in so doing, take sides in a war most Americans wanted to avoid at all costs. Opposition was fierce. The White House was flooded with mail from wives and mothers imploring the president not to sacrifice their husbands and sons in a foreign war, but the alternative was to do nothing while Nazi Germany overran all of Europe.

Roosevelt called the bill that would save Great Britain and the Soviet Union “Lend Lease,†the message being that the guns, ships and planes sent to them would be loaned or rented. His Democratic majority in the House of Representatives patriotically labeled the bill House Resolution 1776, “An Act to Further Promote the Defense of the United States,†and not the nations getting the aid, because the defense of the United States was the ultimate goal.

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Then, to make things perfectly clear, Roosevelt went on the radio and explained the bill in words every citizen could understand:

“Well, let me give you an illustration,†he said to the people he called “my friends,†gathered around their Philcos and Atwater Kents. “Suppose my neighbor’s house catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose. I don’t say, ‘Neighbor, my hose cost me $15, you have to pay me $15 for it.’ I don’t want $15, I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.â€

“I believe it may accurately be said that with that neighborly analogy, Roosevelt won the fight for Lend Lease,†Robert E. Sherwood wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, “Roosevelt and Hopkins.â€

“There were to be two months of some of the bitterest debates in American history, but through it all the American people as a whole maintained the conviction that there couldn’t be anything radical or very dangerous in the president’s proposal to lend our garden hose to the British who were fighting so heroically against such fearful odds. There were probably very few who had any expectation we would ever get the hose back.â€

The opposition faded and Lend Lease passed the Senate by a vote of 60-31 and the House, 317-17.

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President Obama could have used some of that straight, garden hose kind of talk in winning the support of the American people on health-care reform, but unlike Roosevelt, he has allowed the opposition to control the debate. While the administration and its friends in Congress talk about public options and single payers and are vague and unconvincing about how health-care reform will be financed, the opposition keeps it simple by screaming about big government control, socialized medicine, health-care rationing and death panels.

One could see Roosevelt calling the public option “Medicare for Everyone,†which is essentially what it is. He might have used one of his Fireside Chats to tell a story or two about insurance companies that keep patients from receiving the care they need until they die. He’d remind you that you’d want your less fortunate neighbor to receive health care as good as yours if he’s sick.

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Another Roosevelt example for our times: Near the end of World War II and the end of his life, Roosevelt pushed through one last piece of New Deal legislation, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which, to enhance its appeal, was nicknamed the GI Bill of Rights. It was a name that even the most fervent opponent of helping those who won the war adjust to civilian life had trouble criticizing.

The GI Bill is remembered today for sending millions of veterans to college, but its most contentious provision gave $20 a week for 52 weeks in unemployment compensation for jobless veterans. This horrified the Right, who saw the government destroying the rugged individualism of these young survivors of the worst war in the history of the world. But only a few veterans took part in the so-called 52/20 Clubs; many more would become the first members of their families to attend college.

Before the GI Bill expired in 1956, the government educated 7.8 million veterans. The bill also provided low-interest mortgages that put more Americans — eventually 2.4 million — in homes of their own than at any time in history.

Some of those angry men and women waving anti-Obama placards today probably still live in the homes their government-educated fathers or grandfathers bought with a no money down, 1-percent government mortgage in the late 1940s and ’50s.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.