FDR: A model for Obama?

As President-elect Obama and British Prime Minister Brown study Franklin Roosevelt’s famous Hundred Days and look to him for inspiration, it is salutary to remember how unprepared FDR was for the financial crisis that faced him, and how improvisational his response was. The Hundred Days were to a large extent an accident. Roosevelt had to deal with the immediate crisis that had closed most of the nation’s banks, but he took advantage of it by asking Congress to stay in session to pass unprecedented recovery and reform legislation.