1933 and 2008:ECONOMIC CRISIS: THEN & NOW Just three weeks since my October 28th citybizlist commentary, "From Rhetoric to Reality: One Week to Go", we have elected Barack Obama as our 44th President. With comparisons to FDR at the beginning of the Great Depression, Obama has returned to Chicago to assemble an economic team and appoint key Cabinet officers at the State and Defense departments. In sharp contrast to the exiting Herbert Hoover and incoming FDR in 1932, departing President George W. Bush appears to be supportive of the changing of guard. In today's New York Times, respected historian William Leuchtenburg offers a relevant observation: "Barack Obama should bear in mind the Hoover-Roosevelt sequence of events as he threads his way through the minefields of the interregnum from now to January 20th. Unlike Roosevelt, who was all but invisible in the months before his inauguration, Obama seized the initiative last week. That course will make for a smooth transition....however, he should avoid collaboration with a discredited outgoing administration lest he become enmeshed in political commitments before he is vested with power".

In no aspect of power in a democracy is the adage, "The devil is in the details" more relevant than the transfer of that power from an outgoing President to a President-elect. Recently I had the opportunity to spend a day at a Washington College seminar with Steve Hess, one of the Brookings Institution's most thoughtful scholars, and part of management during the transitions of Eisenhower to Kennedy, Johnson to Nixon, Nixon to Ford, and Ford to Carter. In his book "What Do We Do Now?", Steve offers blunt counsel to incoming Presidents: "Tell your appointees that you expect them to schedule serious meetings (not mere courtesy calls) with their departing counterparts". In short, the shift is from promises to the responsibility of power.

In regard to the transition, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter wrote, "Americans are scared and eager for change". As was the case in 1932, when statistically, the economy was worse than today. Unemployment was down 25% compared with 6.5% today; the 1932 stock market was down 90%, not the 40+% of 2008. And the enmity between Obama and Bush seems to be more muted today than 75 years ago when Hoover and FDR emerged from a bitter campaign. As now, the incoming President was running against 8 years of geometrically increasing debt.

My father, while a young teacher of agriculture at McDonogh School, remembered that summer of ‘32 when he was a part-time advisor to the Maryland Agriculture Extension Service in southern Maryland. That part of our state had suffered 3 months of drought so severe the corn and tobacco fields were baked and cracked. On a hot August afternoon, candidate Franklin Roosevelt toured the farm area in an open convertible, and with his memorable personality, reached out to groups of people along the dirt roads to tell them things would be all right. Years later I could remember Dick Wills telling me that when it rained the next three days, many folks in southern Maryland towns were saying: "God came through here and is going to save us all!”

MARYLAND: A WORD OF HOPE

Our own State continues under dominant single party rule and without sufficient necessary constructive, bipartisan analysis. One of Maryland's most thoughtful analysts is Blair Lee, real estate developer and son of one of Maryland's public servants of that same name, the late Governor Blair Lee. In this week's "Montgomery Gazette", Blair emphasizes that “current Gov. O'Malley's biggest re-election problem is not former Gov. Erhlich; it is the economic crisis".

O'Malley "has blamed everything on Ehrlich so that Maryland now has three kinds of budget deficits: structural, when programmed spending exceeds estimated revenues; cyclical, when the budget becomes unbalanced because of unanticipated costs or revenue drops; and inherited deficit, where all is blamed on the previous Governor”.

Blair Lee notes that "O'Malley believes we are climbing out of recession". In reality, we are free falling into a long, potentially deep economic crisis. This theory is supported by the fact that next year's State budget is $1.3 billion and growing.

Budget deficits are bipartisan, where and how they hit us. In Maryland, government and business leaders must also rise above politics as usual. An upcoming conference sponsored by the Regional Manufacturing Institute carries the title: "What's Next? When Leaders Lead". Led by Aris Melissaratos, former secretary of Maryland’s Department of Business and Economic Development, a panel of respected executives will offer suggestions to our tightly controlled Legislature. Now is the time to be on the alert for mistakes and do whatever is possible to prevent them.  6:21 PM •