Dangerous in the Extreme

What follows comes from the private journal of a man close to the president who, when confronted with the reality of the man, looked on in fear and apprehension:

I was impressed as never before by the utter lack of logic of the man, the scantiness of his precise knowledge of things that he was talking about, by the gross inaccuracies in his statements, by the almost pathological lack of sequence in his discussion, by the complete rectitude that he felt as to his own conduct, by the immense and growing egotism that came from his office, by his willingness to continue the excoriation of...business in order to get votes for himself, by his indifference to what effect the long-continued pursuit of these ends would have upon the civilization in which he was playing a part. In other words, the political habits of his mind were working full steam with the added influence of a swollen ego. My deliberate impression is that he is dangerous in the extreme, and I view the next four years with no inconsiderable apprehension.

This was written in 1936 in the diary of a member of Franklin Roosevelt's "Brains Trust," Raymond Moley, in the run-up to the election for FDR's second term.

I pulled this quote from New Deal or Raw Deal? by Burton Folsom, Jr., which critically examines FDR's New Deal programs and exposes them for the destructive and rights-violating abominations that they were. The book includes a large amount of biographical and historical material about FDR himself, and the more I read the more I see stronger parallels with Obama than I thought existed. I find this latest quote from Moley especially interesting in light of some of my recent (admittedly not all that recent) posts about White House insiders and their view of Obama. Moley could have been writing in 2011.

Let us hope that Obama's rhetoric and Democratic machine is not as effective as FDR's was.