One point of cheer for president Obama is this: When FDR lost so painfully in the 1938 midterms, he worked with Congress, built up his Democratic base, and won two more presidential re-elections in 1940 and 1944.
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GOP gains already changing course of Obama's presidency
National Perspective
By David M. Shribman
December 11, 2010
GOP gains already changing course of Obama's presidency
Some excerpts :
The biggest midterm congressional election defeat in modern times came in 1938, when Franklin Roosevelt's Democrats lost 71 House seats and six Senate seats. And that number understates FDR's defeat, because Sens. Walter George of Georgia, Ellison D. "Cotton Ed" Smith of South Carolina and Millard Tydings of Maryland all survived, but as anti-New Deal Democrats.
Ordinarily the 1938 midterms would have been his last and FDR would have been a lame-duck president. But Roosevelt chose to run again in 1940, when he won an unprecedented third term.
There is no question that the changed political landscape changed the Roosevelt presidency, just as it already has altered the Obama presidency.
The 1938 campaign made FDR rethink his fiscal conservatism — a fiscal conservatism that some of Obama's onetime allies on the left now worry has infected the current president. But like Obama, FDR faced a Congress that was far more conservative than it had been and that constrained him as he contemplated a Europe embroiled in tensions he knew would lead to war. Thus began a period of political deadlock that in many historians' view lasted through 1964.
"With all of the talk about how badly the Obama Democrats did in the recent elections," says William E. Leuchtenburg, one of FDR's most distinguished biographers, "Roosevelt's results were even worse"
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