Obama doesn’t mirror Eisenhower

By Art Gisi, Las Vegas

Saturday, Dec. 27, 2014 | 2:01 a.m.

Regarding the Dec. 10 letter to the editor, “It’s time to stop the move to the right”: Claiming President Barack Obama has used President Dwight Eisenhower as a model for governing is blind liberalism.

The Eisenhower administration’s goal, called dynamic conservatism, aimed to balance budgets and protect us from creeping socialism. The federal government didn’t need to stimulate the economy because the United States was the only completely intact economy after WWII. That continued until late 1957, when the U.S. economy went into recession because of more competition from around the world. By the summer of 1958, the economy was beginning to rebound. Because of that recession, Eisenhower was only able to balance the budget in five of his eight years in office and still managed, as an example, to build the interstate highway system and return the oil industry to state control.

The economy in the ’50s didn’t have to deal with the EPA. Politicians also were different. They weren’t afraid to compromise to get things done for the country, unlike today, when political position is more important than results. These are some of the reasons the middle class was prosperous during the ’50s.

The recent stimulus package was supposed to fund shovel-ready jobs, putting people back to work. There are still millions unemployed or underemployed, and the economy still hasn’t fully recovered. We have more regulations now than ever; the oil industry is just now starting to recover because of loosened fracking regulations.

That doesn’t sound anything like the Eisenhower administration.