Sitting here in The Nation's London bureau watching Barack Obama take the office was a surreal experience. I'm still coming down from the thrill of hearing Aretha make "My Country Tis of Thee" a truly beautiful song--and the deep, deep relief of watching Dick Cheney slide into his limo and out of our lives. The 100 days have just begun.

So what can we learn from the past, and more specifically from Anthony Badger's brilliant evocation of a desperate time when a callow young president known best for his oratorical gifts came to office at a time of national crisis, with the world economy locked in a downward spiral, newspaper headlines dominated by bank failures and financial chicanery, rising unemployment and falling stock prices? First, that economic history isn't over either, and that the overweening confidence swelling the many apologias for capitalist triumphalism over the past decade were no more grounded in reality than those who saw in George W. Bush's imperial arrogance merely the righteous inevitablity of American dominance. Second that if we are indeed, as President Obama pledged, about to embark on remaking America, we would do well to begin on the ground of solid fact rather than ideological conjecture.

And here precisely is where I think Professor Badger proves so useful. Unlike the New Left revisionists of my own youth, who saw Roosevelt and the New Deal mainly as a series of missed opportunities, or more recent right-wing critics such as Amity Schlaes, who see Roosevelt dimly through their own preconceptions about the infallible efficiency of unfettered markets, Badger allows us to see FDR as his contemporaries did: as a pragmatic politician with a genius for improvisation. Not that, even at the time, this was universally understood. Even so fervent a New Dealer as the radical journalist I.F. Stone--in 1933 himself a supporter of the Socialist candidate Norman Thomas--began by underestimating FDR, dismissing him as tweedledum to Hoover's tweedledee. (Which underscores a significant difference between our time and 1933. Although not demographically significant, the left, from Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party to Foster and the Communists, provided both critique and cover to Roosevelt. Obama has neither the intellectual goad of a critical left nor the cover provided by a organized alternative to the Democratic Party.)

So I would agree with Julian Zelizer that it was "bold persistent experimentation"--and a ruthless willingness to jettison whatever didn't work--that enabled Roosevelt to achieve so much. Allan Lichtman's four points also have much to recommend them, particularly, in my view, his reminder that successful presidents don't move toward the center. They make the center come to them. And I share Lichtman's implicit suggestion that Obama should be audacious as well as inspirational. But I would also stress the importance of simple political cunning. FDR never forgot how to count votes--at least not during presidential election years. The mess Obama has inherited will need more than four years to clean up. And though FDR occasionally did find himself on the wrong side of the numbers--on Supreme Court reform, and more generally on his efforts to elect a Congress less beholden to Bourbon power--he was far more often a master of electoral calculus. Perhaps Obama will have better luck with Congress. Certainly coming from Chicago, he too ought to be able to count.