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SCMP Reporter

Roosevelt's legacy hangs over poll
It is usual for  US presidents to style themselves as the 'leader of the free world'. In many respects, it is a hard sentiment to argue with.
Yet the  current presidential election and international economic breakdown  are conspiring to create a disturbing leadership vacuum.
In the White House sits outgoing President George W. Bush. His popularity now valued at 'pennies on the dollar', as one Washington commentator put it, he is the lamest of ducks.
As he walked out on the White House lawn on Saturday after meeting officials from leading economic nations to urge patience and pledge international co-ordination, there was no clear sign that the markets would take any real notice. It was the 20th time he had spoken on the issue in 27 days - rhetoric painfully ignored as Wall Street endured in steepest five-day drop last week.
Then there are the two candidates to replace him, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. Both in their way are sharp and worldly and surrounded by internationally minded economic advisers. Senator McCain is close to eBay chief executive Meg Whitman  and her former Hewlett-Packard counterpart Carly Fiorina.  Senator Obama, meanwhile, taps former treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs executive Robert Rubin  and America's most successful investor, Warren Buffett.
Yet both  candidates are  hamstrung by the demands of a particularly intensive campaign and its forensic focus on domestic policy. As the crisis of confidence spread from New York across the world last week, both  men touched on the need for global leadership during their second debate and stump speeches, but only in the lightest of terms. Rarely did the rhetoric move beyond platitudes of railing against Wall Street on behalf of 'Main Street'.
Instead, their responses were most detailed on domestic economic matters - spending, taxation and the funding of health care and social programmes.
Senator Obama continued to demand the strictest possible oversight over the US$700 billion Wall Street bailout and insisted he had urged stricter regulation of the subprime bubble. Senator McCain, meanwhile, risked infuriating his small-government supporters by proposing a further US$300 billion in government funds to help people remortgage their homes against tumbling values.
With each passing day of the crisis, it is increasingly  likely each candidate's campaign promises  would have to be trimmed to very different circumstances once in office. And with working Americans having lost  about US$2 trillion in retirement investments in 15 months, it is  questionable  whether either candidate has fully  grasped the scale of the problem.
The campaigns also hardly mentioned the international crisis meetings that were under way in the US  this weekend. Symbolically, as the world's leading economic ministers,  the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met in Washington, the candidates surfaced in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Their  running mates are even more intensely domestically focused, given their attack-dog role on behalf of their bosses. Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin rails constantly against the 'greed and corruption' on Wall Street, while her Democratic rival Joe Biden voices similar concerns. He also questions the patriotism of corporate America's use of tax havens to skirt levies - a touch ironic given that he is a senator  from Delaware, the favoured home of many large firms  because of its low corporate tax rates.
As the chasm widens between hard international reality and the slick manoeuvres of domestic campaigning, the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who led the US through the Great Depression, hangs heavily.
As a statement of intent, his inaugural address in 1933 appears disturbingly relevant. 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself,' was his iconic phrase - a term that buoyed the world. Both Mr Bush and Senator Obama have repeated the sentiment over the  past week, but neither has come close to the impact.
'This isn't a time for fear or for panic,' Senator Obama said. 'This  is a time for resolve and steady leadership.'
Mr Bush, who has never been accused of rhetorical flourish, hardly eased tensions when he said: 'Anxiety can feed anxiety, and that can make it hard to see all that is being done to solve the problem.'
Roosevelt, of course, went further. He told the world that the 'money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilisation'. He added: 'We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.'
Those values led to the New Deal, which changed American society and made his presidency one of the most controversial. But it still marked a turning point on the road to recovery. His legacy is still hotly debated and some of the institutions he created, including social-security federal insurance, remain in place today.
It must be noted that  Roosevelt, a Democrat, campaigned in 1932 as a fiscal conservative, promising spending cuts and balanced budgets, against an even more conservative Republican, Herbert Hoover. But by the time he got to the podium for his inaugural address, the full extent of the Great Depression was weighing upon him.
The nature of a globalised economy means that today's candidates don't have the luxury of time. And even if we are not quite at the door of another Great Depression, the world is still waiting for either John McCain or Barack Obama to have their FDR moment.



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Barack Obama

America waits for another FDR moment