Julian Zelizer is right to stress the common theme of under-consumption that underpinned the New Deal rhetoric of the 1930s. As he points out it was a rhetoric that united middle-class consumers and workers that was key to support both for Social Security and the Wagner Act. It was the key to the Democratic Party electoral successes of 1936 and 1940. At the local level it also helps explain why there was so much community support for striking workers: middle-class political sentiment was not necessarily on the side of 'law and order' and the employer. It was one of the factors that made the 1930s so distinctive in American history. Before the 1930s you had to go back to the mid to late nineteenth century, as Herbert Gutman noted, to find local middle-class solidarity with local artisans and workers against 'outside' employers. After the 1940s Meg Jacobs showed how consumers could be persuaded that organized labor, not business, was the cause of their difficulties during World War II and in the post-war inflation.

Partly because of that consumer-producer link, there was as Don Guttenplan's posts remind us, a radical cutting edge to the politics of the 1930s that we have never seen again. It is also a radical cutting edge that is absent today. No wonder historians on the right blame the New Deal for promoting class conflict rather than class unity.

As for the role of World War II in ending the Depression, I agree with Julian that to say that is not to diminish the achievements of the New Deal. These made all the difference to ordinary Americans in the 1930s and cemented the loyalty of lower-income voters to the Democratic Party for a generation. I do think that inevitably it took a long time in the 1930s to conceive of an economy of abundance. Until the late 1930s and the prominence of economists like Lauchlin Currie and Mordecai Ezekiel, most New Dealers thought that the American economy had reached 'maturity', that the government might have a permanent role in looking after the unemployed who would be there even after recovery came. The notion of a full employment economy that could be sustained by government policy was really not influential until FDR's decision to spend again in 1938. World War II confirmed that undreamt of new jobs could be created.

A final thought on the prospects of Obama with Congress. In the emergency of 1933 congressmen heard loud and clear from their constituents that they should back the president and even then they did not give the president a blank check. When I look at Congress today I see a Democratic Party that is not use to governing. It has controlled the presidency and Congress for only 6 years in the past 40 (and 1977-80, and 1993-4 are not very inspiring models). As I said in my first post, will Republicans from safe seats and freshmen Democrats from previously Republican seats give Obama support for massive spending programs? There is a mean-spirited quality to politics in Washington, especially in the House, that does augur well for a constructive congressional response. Former senators like John Culver and Dale Bumpers recall the 1970s with nostalgia as a time when congressmen saw their role as to legislate - which inevitably meant constructive cross-the aisle cooperation. They see today's politics dominated by symbolic, not legislative, issues: hot-button issues like abortion and same sex marriage which most of the time will be decided by the courts not by the legislature. Politicians attempt to force their opponents to be arraigned publicly on the wrong side of such issues.

I am sure there is an element of rose-tinted glow to the memories of the Congress of earlier times. But there can be no doubt that it will take all of Obama's talents as a communicator and a sharp-edged political operator, 'political cunning' as Don Guttenplan described FDR's skills, to get Congress to act.