President Obama needs an argument. The economic stimulus plan is already coming under fire from the left and the right, only days after he was sworn in as president (two times, in fact). In The New York Times, my colleague at Princeton Paul Krugman has written that he "ended Tuesday less confident about the direction of economic policy than I was in the morning." Krugman goes on to criticize the "platitudes in his Inaugural Address" as a warning sign that Obama might find his administration "dangerously behind the curve." Republicans are now raising their concerns as well. Republican congressional leaders are complaining that the stimulus bill coming out of the House is big on pork-barrel spending projects and deficient on measures that would actually stimulate the economy in the short term.

The waters are getting rough and Obama has barely stepped into the ocean. The President can't wait too long or he could lose control of the debate. An effective response will depend on many things, with one of the most important being his ability to develop an overriding and compelling argument about how we ended up in this economic crisis and how we can get out.

It is true, as Badger writes, that in the First Hundred Days it was hard to see any coherent philosophical approach to economic recovery: "not even Roosevelt's most ardent defenders would argue that the legislation of the first Hundred Days was coherent and carefully thought out." But, over the next few years, historians, including Badger, have shown that the New Dealers did make certain key arguments that provided an ideological framework for voters to understand the logic behind the Alphabet Soup that was gradually created. New Dealers argued that under-consumption was at the heart of the economic crisis and that by boosting the wages of working and middle class Americans, the nation would be able to achieve higher economic ground. As Badger writes in a wonderful essay in his edited book Contested Democracy, "what linked both these voters and policy makers was the importance of mass purchasing power--a strategy that called for high wages and low prices, a strategy that linked them to middle-class consumers. One of the distinctive features of political discourse in the 1930s was, as Meg Jacobs [a historian at MIT who wrote a prize-winning book on the subject] emphasized, that labor and the middle class were not seen to be at odds. It was this common cause between workers and consumers that gave the new Democratic Party its reforming thrust and dynamism...."

President Obama and Democrats need to find their argument. As Americans struggle through this turbulent economy, watching their savings disappear and home prices plummet, they are scared. They will also be nervous as they learn about more proposals for large and expensive government programs. If they thought the Wall Street bailout was big, they ain't seen nothing yet. One of the most important jobs of the president is to sell programs and not just propose them, to justify government intervention and to build support for what is needed. A president has to act a bit like a professor, helping create order out of chaos by explaining the causes of the situation a nation faces and by providing a roadmap to a healthier future. Unless Obama develops an argument comparable to the New Dealers, which thus far he has not, Obama won't enjoy the kind of political success achieved by FDR.

On a side note, I think there is a healthy debate now taking place in Washington and the media about whether the New Deal or World War II ended the Great Depression. But just as some conservative pundits dismiss positive accounts of the New Deal as "leftist" interpretations, in recent days some commentators have been dismissing arguments that the New Deal was not able to end the Depression as coming right out of "right-wing" talking points.

That claim about this historical argument is wrong. Many liberal scholars, who believe the New Deal had a huge effect and improved economic conditions in the 1930s, also conclude that the programs did not end the Great Depression. Columbia historian Alan Brinkley, in his masterful account of the New Deal, recounts how the 1937 recession indicated to many in the administration that the problems from 1929 were still at work. In an interview for PBS, Brinkley said: "Contrary to some of its own mythology, the New Deal did not end the Depression. It moderated the Depression at least during some periods of the 1930s; it kept the Depression from getting worse perhaps. But the Depression didn't end until 1940, and it was World War II that brought it to an end, by increasing government spending for war materials so dramatically that people were brought back into the work force in enormous numbers very quickly." Stanford historian David Kennedy, another prominent historian who few would characterize as a child of the Reagan Revolution, wrote in his Pulitzer Prize winning account of the New Deal and World War II, "Roosevelt himself stood before the world in 1938 as a badly weakened leader, unable to summon the imagination or to secure the political strength to cure his own country's apparently endless economic crisis. In the ninth year of the Great Depression and the sixth year of Roosevelt's New Deal, with more than ten million workers still unemployed, America had still not found a formula for economic recovery." This is not even to mention the library shelves that are filled with books by left-wing historians from the 1960s and 1970s who went much farther in their critique.

My point here is just to offer a small suggestion that scholars should not dismiss those who believe that it took World War II to end the Depression as an ideologically motivated analysis or one grounded in a conservative perspective. Moreover, saying that the New Deal did not end the Great Depression is not the same as saying that it did not have an enormous impact on the economy. The Great Depression offered huge relief to struggling Americans, dramatically improved economic conditions from where they had been in 1932, and created a solid infrastructure for economic growth in the coming decades. Just as important, none of this could have been accomplished politically without some good arguments.