I’ve written previously of one of my favorite political quotes, from Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt was asked if, somehow, Herbert Hoover might play a role after Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt accurately assessed the impossibility of political rehabilitation:
Not even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor could bring Hoover back into the mainstream of official Washington, D.C. Within days of the attack, Roosevelt summoned Bernard Baruch to the White House for a discussion of how best to organize the home front for victory.
Courageously, Baruch said that the best man for such an effort was Herbert Hoover. What’s more, Baruch knew him to be available. FDR shot down the idea with devastating sangfroid. According to one who was there, the president said, “I’m not Jesus Christ. I’m not raising him from the dead.”
A few gentlemen of this city are free to tout the last municipal administration’s record of wasteful projects and serial mendacity, so much as they should like. It’s their right, after all.
But if Franklin Roosevelt wouldn’t (knowing he couldn’t) rehabilitate Hebert Hoover, how well will these few do with their local version of that task?