The Wall Street Journal reports that Perry’s communications director, Ray Sullivan, had “never heard” of Perry’s views on Social Security and said that the book, which was released last November, was written “as a review and critique of 50 years of federal excesses, not in any way as a 2012 campaign blueprint or manifesto.” Perry has been telling audiences in Iowa and New Hampshire to read the book.

In the book, he calls Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” that was enacted by FDR “at the expense of respect for the Constitution and limited government.”

He despises the New Deal, noting that the “era represents the second big step in the march of socialism and was the key to releasing the remaining constraints on the national government’s power grab in American history … FDR tried to change the way that citizens interacted with their government.”

The Supreme Court has ruled the program constitutional, and Perry now says he wants benefits for current beneficiaries and those about to retire “strongly protected,” and he said his aim is to make seek a program that is “fiscally responsible and actuarially sound.”

Rick Santorum voiced his belief that Iowans are prepared to once again play their critical role in the nation's presidential selection process. (Photo: Lynda Waddington/The Iowa Independent)

“There are a lot of people today who pull out their Constitution and hold it high and say, ‘This is how America should function. These are our constitutional principles.’ And, they are right. That’s the how of America. It’s important. It’s the process. But it is the how, and not the why. The why is in that other document that is also usually in their Constitutional book — the Declaration of Independence,” Santorum told the roughly 80 people gathered at the Clarion hotel.

“America is a moral enterprise. People say, ‘Why do you talk about the moral issues, Senator? Why don’t you just talk about jobs and the economy?’ Because America is not just about jobs and the economy. America is a moral enterprise at its core.”

Philosophers and theologians, he said, had opined for centuries about how man was endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights, but America was the first country to put such a statement “rooted in Judeo-Christian understanding of our relationship with god” into writing and practice. Although the founding documents don’t come right out and say so, he said, the object of America, the how in the Constitution, was to create a limited government whose sole purpose — “the one thing America is about” — is to keep citizens free.

“Our founders understood that … freedom is not to do what you want to do. Freedom is to do what you ought to do — to serve god, to be your brother’s keeper and to love and support your family,” the Pennsylvania Republican said. “That’s the ‘ought to.’ That’s freedom. That’s liberty. When you hear our founders talk about liberty, that’s what they mean.”

To define freedom as people being allowed to do whatever it is they want to do “to pursue their wants and passions,” he said, would result in anarchy. And, because America’s founders had the foresight and vision to create a nation built on such unprecedented principles, Santorum took particular exception to recent remarks made by Obama that the U.S. became a great nation when it enacted programs to provide for elderly and vulnerable citizens.

“So, it offends me. It upsets me when the President of the United States says that our country was not a great country until people like him, people who believe in government, say that they are going to do things for you,” Santorum said. “That doesn’t make us great. It makes us like every other country in the world where authoritarians believe that they can better provide for you than you can provide for yourself.”

On April 13, during an address on fiscal policy, Obama said:

… Part of this American belief that we’re all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security and dignity. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff may strike any one of us. “There but for the grace of God go I,” we say to ourselves. And so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, those with disabilities. We’re a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further. We would not be a great country without those commitments. …

Many conservatives pointed out that all three programs highlighted by Obama were instituted in 1965, and have inferred that Obama was claiming the U.S. was not a great nation until that time.

Santorum also offered Obama some back-handed praise, saying that if it wasn’t for the President’s “radical agenda” citizens might have been content to sit like frogs in a slowly heating pot until they died. The policies being enacted by the Obama administration, he said, have drastically turned up the heat, causing many citizens to realize what was happening before it was too late.

“You know what’s at stake in America today? America is at stake in America — what we are all about, what generations of veterans have fought and died for, the ideals that made us different,” said Santorum.

Calling the upcoming 2012 election the most important since that of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, Santorum pleaded with local activists to do their due diligence in vetting presidential candidates. In addition to selecting a candidate that can win the general election, Republicans also need to be true to their conservative principles, and they need to apply their energy and focus to every federal seat on the upcoming ballot.

“You want conservatives to make big changes in Washington? Then you better get about sending us the horses that can get it done,” he said, noting that during the three times in the past 100 years when Democrats held the White House with a visionary president, controlled the U.S. House and had a super-majority in the U.S. Senate that significant change occurred (such as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society).

“Has it ever happened that we had a conservative president, a majority of the House and a filibuster-proof U.S. Senate in Republican hands? Answer: never. … So, you want to see some big changes? [In] the U.S. Senate — I served there — if you don’t have 60 votes, you need Democrats to pass almost anything. If America wants to see a big change, it can’t just be electing a president. We have to elect United States senators across this country.”

Santorum visited Cedar Rapids as part of the Iowa GOP Chairman’s Speaker Series. On Monday, Santorum will again be in eastern Iowa when he keynotes an event at the University of Iowa for The Family Leader, a religious conservative organization led by Bob Vander Plaats.

With the quick publication and subsequent tour for his book following his re-election to a fourth term as Texas governor, many have speculated that Perry is in the early stages of a bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Even though the book and its title seem tailored to to conservative primary voters, Perry has insisted that he has no plans at mounting a presidential campaign. Today, he pointed to the book as evidence that he does not have grand national ambitions.

Perry focused his speech on national entitlement programs as the central issue facing the nation, and one where his frank views would exclude him from running for higher office.

“There have been a lot of political figures totally and absolutely afraid to talk about that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme,” Perry said. “My eldest child is 27, my baby is 24, and they know that Social Security is not going to be there for them. So let’s talk about it, what are some of the options that are out there.”

Perry also highlighted other social support programs that he would like to see addressed by state governments rather than through federal initiatives. He spoke positively of recent suggestions by Texas Republicans to remove the state from federal Medicaid and administer the program at the state level instead.

“The fact is many of us [state governors] would like to be in charge of those pension programs,” Perry said. “Medicaid is a good example of just last week, right after the election, our Texas House had a study group on how to better deliver those health care costs.”

But Social Security received the brunt of Perry’s criticism.

“We have to address these issues and not be afraid and tell the truth, and push back on those who would do nothing more than be fear mongers for the standpoint of ‘Oh, they’re going to take your Social Security away,’” Perry said. “They don’t have to tell that to my children, they already know that, there will be no Social Security for them if we don’t stand up as a people and address this issue.”

Perry railed against federal government intervention broadly, going back in history to criticize the 16th Amendment’s introduction of the federal income tax, with his heaviest scorn reserved for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.

“The fact of the matter is it is a legacy of glut, glut of federal programs, including a Social Security program that is not only bankrupt, but also had very little to do with America’s emergence from the Great Depression,” Perry said. Instead, Perry held up the Tenth Amendment as the ideal of how the government should operate. National defense was the only federal spending cast in a favorable light during the appearance.

As the book tour and appearances at prominent organizations like the Heritage Foundation indicate, Perry is positioning himself as one of the prominent voices of the party. Entering his fourth term in the governor’s office, Perry risks the establishment label that Republican grassroots have revolted against recently, but thanks to his primary campaign against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and his consistent anti-Washington rhetoric, Perry has been able to take up the mantle of the Tea Party while maintaining his credibility as an experienced politician.

As Republicans return to power in the next session of Congress, Perry has taken the lead in pushing the national party to stay true to its message of minimal federal intervention, with the majority of government power invested in the states. Rather than calling for the complete dissolution of entitlements like Social Security, Perry has said he prefers to see the power over the programs in the hands of state governments, a sentiment he has already relayed to the new congressional leaders.

“Saturday night, presumptive-elect Speaker Boehner and I had a meeting. We spent a couple hours together talking about how the governors can be more engaged with this process,” Perry said. “The message from John Boehner is very clear, that he was listening Tuesday night, and that finding the solutions to the challenges that face us as a country emanate from the states, and not from Washington, D.C.”

Patrick Caldwell is a reporter for The American Independent.

… American Progressives and European fascist theorists admired each other and exchanged ideas. From William James to Georges Sorel, from eugenics to the militarization of society (“War on Poverty” anyone? It was William James who penned the “Moral Equivalent of War” in 1906), both the American left and European fascists sought to remake society using crises to urge action to justify bigger government at the expense of individual liberty.

Ronald Reagan had it right in 1981, when he remarked that Roosevelt’s New Deal had much in common with Mussolini’s fascism, including frequent words of praise from Roosevelt’s brain trust directed towards Italy in the 1930s.

Absolutely nothing controversial here from the Tea Party perspective, and the “words of praise” line is accurate. But how will this play in a state that in 2008 gave Barack Obama the biggest Democratic landslide margin since FDR in 1936?

At one point in her book, in fact, Shlaes actually concedes that Roosevelt’s Keynesian experiment succeeded when he tried it. “The spending was so dramatic that, finally, it functioned as Keynes … had hoped it would,” she writes about 1936, “Within a year unemployment would drop from 22 percent to 14 percent.” So Keynesian policy worked, and the main fiscal problem with the New Deal was that Roosevelt made too many concessions to the right. Here we are in agreement. So can conservatives stop carrying around The Forgotten Man like it’s Mao’s Little Red Book? Can we all go home now?

The problem with the Republican arguments for a combination of deep tax cuts and spending cuts is that no one can point to a recession that this program ended. Tax cuts and spending, yes. Tax increases and meddling with interest rates, yes. But the homespun wisdom of Republicans like Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), that the government should cut back spending just like an average family is doing, is not backed up by anything.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Tennessee Valley Authority Act in 1933. (tva.gov)

President-elect Barack Obama is confronting a cascading economic crisis, which seems to worsen by the day, not the week. As venerable banking houses collapse, once-mighty industries teeter on the brink of oblivion and unemployment mounts, the air thickens with recollections of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and comparisons between Obama and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But let’s define our terms. So what exactly was the Great Depression, and what did FDR do about it?

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The short answer is: The Great Depression was a rare political opportunity, and Roosevelt made the most of it — to the nation’s lasting benefit.

A longer answer would acknowledge that the Great Depression was a catastrophic economic crisis that Roosevelt failed to resolve – at least not until World War II came along, some eight years after he took office.

A still longer answer would recognize the connection between FDR’s short-term economic policy failure and the New Deal’s long-term political success. Much misunderstanding surrounds this matter.

“At the heart of the New Deal,” the distinguished historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, “there was not a philosophy but a temperament.” In a kind of caricature of Hofstadter’s view, a New York Times writer not long ago said that Roosevelt “threw a slew of policies at the wall, and whatever stuck became the New Deal.”

That accepted view of the New Deal — as a kind of harum-scarum frenzy of random, incoherent policies that failed to slay the Depression demon — has become deeply embedded in our national folklore. But it is woefully and mischievously mistaken.

The fact is that Roosevelt purposely forged in the crucible of the nation’s most harrowing economic crisis a set of reforms that cohered in a more systematic pattern than is dreamt of in most philosophies. The essential logic of that pattern fairly leaps from the pages of the historical record. It can be described in a single word: security.

A Great Depression bread line, as depicted at the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC (Flickr: Tony the Misfit)

It is altogether fitting and proper that the New Deal’s most durable and consequential reform bears that very word in its title: the Social Security Act of 1935. A even greater measure of security was the New Deal’s gift to millions of Americans — farmers and workers, immigrants and blue-bloods, children and the elderly, as well as countless industrialists, bankers, and merchants, not to mention enormous tracts of forest, prairie, and mountain.

Forget about the colorful creations of the decidedly frenzied and much ballyhooed Hundred Days — like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Industrial Recovery Act. Most of them were attended by much sound and fury, but signified little, and strutted the briefest of hours on history’s stage.

But all the New Deal reforms that endured – the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Housing Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the Fair Labor Standards Act and, above all, the Social Security Act — had a common cardinal purpose. Roosevelt’s goal was not simply to end the immediate crisis of the Great Depression, but to make life less risky, to temper for generations thereafter what FDR repeatedly called the “hazards and vicissitudes” of life.

The New Deal provided more assurance to bank depositors (FDIC), more reliable information to investors (SEC), more safety to lenders (FHA), more stability to relations between capital and labor (NLRB), more predictable wages to the most vulnerable workers (FLSA), and a safety net for both the unemployed and the elderly (Social Security).

Those innovations re-wove the very fabric of national life. They profoundly shaped the fates of Americans born long after the crisis of the Great Depression had passed. With the exception of the FDIC, none dates from 1933.

Had economic health been miraculously restored in the fabled Hundred Days, a swift return to business as usual might have meant politics as usual as well — and none of those landmark reforms would have come to pass. Indeed, there would have been no New Deal as we know it.

Roosevelt understood this. He was a deeply strategic political actor and an astute student of history. He keenly appreciated what the engines of history had wrought and what they might be made to yield in the uniquely enabling circumstance of the Depression.

FDR had sketched the broad outline of his grand design well before the Great Depression descended. Proposals for old-age pensions, for example, dated back to the platform of the Progressive Party in 1912, which nominated for president his beloved cousin and political role model, Theodore Roosevelt. FDR publicly endorsed the idea as early as 1930.

But FDR also told his fellow Democrats throughout the 1920s that his comprehensive reform agenda must wait “until the Republicans had led us into a serious period of depression and unemployment.” He eventually confronted a more dangerous depression than he could have anticipated — but he realized the opportunity that it afforded.

The Chinese character for “crisis,” we are told, is a melding of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” FDR did not read Chinese, but he appreciated the logic of that etymology.

In his extraordinary second Inaugural Address, delivered Jan. 20, 1937, Roosevelt crowed about the actually quite modest recovery since 1933. “Our progress out of the depression is obvious,” he said. Then he added something altogether novel in the annals of presidential addresses: “Such symptoms of prosperity may become portents of disaster!” Roosevelt went on to describe the “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” whose plight made a mockery of the American dream.

The context made it clear that he was not then speaking about the victims of the transient depression crisis, which he saw as ending, but about the accumulated social and human deficits spawned by more than a century of let-‘er-rip, swashbuckling, unregulated American capitalism — deficits not yet fully redeemed.

Solving that problem was what he meant when he said that “this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

“We are going to make a country,” Roosevelt once remarked, “in which no one is left out.”

In that unadorned sentence, Roosevelt summed up his highest purposes and his lasting accomplishments. The New Deal’s legacy was to give countless Americans, who until then had never had much of it, a strong sense of security. And with it, Roosevelt gave them a deeper sense of having a stake in their country and a bond with their countrymen.

Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, seems to have taken this essential history lesson on board. “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste,” he said recently. “It’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”

Like Roosevelt, Obama faces an urgent economic crisis. Like Roosevelt, Obama must use the (now considerably greater) powers of government to restore economic health. But like Roosevelt, Obama will ultimately be judged not simply on whether or how he ended this crisis, but on how he used it.

We have our own accumulated social and human deficits. Some, like the lack of universal health care, have been begging for attention since Roosevelt’s time. Others, including a crumbling infrastructure, struggling public schools, climate change, energy dependence, environmental degradation, widening income disparity and illegal immigration, have been festering merely for the last several decades.

If this generation is to have its own rendezvous with destiny, and if Obama wants to stand in FDR’s company, those matters can no longer be avoided.

David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University. He won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.”

For example, here’s one such idea today, in The Wall Street Journal. It’s called a Shared Appreciation Mortgage, or SAM. Lenders would take a loss as they wrote down a borrower’s mortgage debt. But should the home appreciate in value eventually, lenders would then share in the gains. The notion was described by four economics and law professors, Andrew Caplin, Thomas Cooley, Noel Cunningham and Mitchell Engler. Here’s more:

A homeowner unable to support payments on a house purchased for $200,000 that today is worth only $150,000 might be offered a write-down of up to $50,000. But this would not be a free lunch.

With the SAM, once the value began appreciating above $150,000, the mortgage holders would be due their share. The details of the write-down and the appreciation sharing could be tailored to different circumstances. But one way to give lenders a share of the upside would be to pay back some of the write-down if the house is later sold, in the scenario above, for more than $150,000. This is a model in which both parties benefit, preventing default while giving future taxpayers a fighting chance at some real upside to the investment we’re forcing on them.

The authors contend the government needs to tackle a bold solution, and this would fit that bill.

So far, the government has been making bold moves — but only when it comes to rescuing banks. Will it do the same for homeowners? The SAM authors say there’s precedent for the government to act:

Almost 75 years ago, in the depths of the Great Depression, the nation faced a housing market collapse even more brutal than today. The federal government responded with a strategy that allowed homeowners to keep their homes and kept the bottom from falling out of the real-estate market. Unprecedented at the time, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage has since become the gold standard in markets around the world.

Today, facing a similar collapse, the federal government needs to be equally bold. SAMs are the new deal in housing that our children need.