Newsweek's Robert Samuelson has a Homer Chimpson moment:

Shuffling top advisers can't compensate for an agenda that seems driven more by partisan preferences than by important national needs.

Now Samuelson doesn't have a narrative for prosperity, so he advises "cheaper, meaner, dummer" as the better alternative - raise retirement ages, cut benefits. Make the poor pay. Otherwise, we will have to raise taxes. As Homer is going to say alot in the upcoming movie "D'oh". Samuelson, like most people, doesn't get it. The reason that people avoid political pain is that there is no reason to pay the pain now - it might not come, you might be dead, or you might have retired to some distant island by that time, or found some other way to avoid the pain. It's the long range varient of "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that feller behind the tree."

What Bush has, and why he acts like a 60% President rather than a 30% President is a narrative of prosperity - a road to a painless future. So who should we be listening to? FDR. It is time to realize that the solution of slashing away our social capital is no solution, as it will leave us poorer than before.

Our problems are not FDR's problems. In his day, pushing off political pain had reached that point where there was no escape - not in the US, and not in Europe. The responses would define the next 15 years - years of depression, war and disaster. It is widely believed that FDR didn't "fix the economic problem", with the New Deal. On the contrary, the 8 years of the New Deal in the Depression filled the role of battlefield medic - preventing the patient from bleeding to death while the surgery that would be the cure. The cure was to propel the world into the mechanized and broadcast economy, and to do so without resorting to totalitarianism. These problems created other, more lasting problems, with which FDR's political descendence would cope for another 50 years.

But the basic problem is the same - the old solutions do not, will not, and cannot work. Each old solution has its own coterie, its own standing army of think tanks and university professors, its own army of slide rules turned into spreadsheets. Each one boils down to one of two end points - print money and hope the Chinese and Japanese and Saudis keep taking it. Or telling alot of (other) people to work harder and get less, because the arteries of profit need to be kept in place.

This is a moment which calls for exactly the mantra Jonathan Alter's new book focuses on: "Relentless experimentation". Because the one constant between that moment and this, is that while the outlines of what must be done are clear - the actual implementation is cloudy. A rigid committment to a particular view or end is precisely what prevents there from being a governing consensus for change. Change wins polls, but when asked what kind, there is no majority. What FDR brought was trust to the varying constituencies for change - that their ideas would get a fair shot, and if proved effective, kept. FDR himself would often appropriate means and fill them with ends that only he and a few other people could understand. Social Security was originally simply a demand side idea, it was FDR and his advisors who grasped that it had a larger purpose in the economy. Devaluation was proposed by others, but FDR used it as a piece of currency adjustment. He did not design a new monetary system, but instead passed the pieces as others came up with them - each time selecting the most conservative radicalism - or the most radical conservatism - that he could find. And then explaining it to the country.

This process - of selecting from the broadest range of ideas, and then making them coherent - is what joined Churchill and FDR - both were more than pragmatists, though they were ultimately pragmatic. Instead of actions, such as cutting taxes, that merely searched for justifications - and then padded with pork to slosh them down - they instead had a vision of the world as it ought to be, and found means toward it. Where as hardness on the brouhahas of the day is what most people define as having integrity and internal consistency - both men measured themselves against unseen yardsticks. They did not tack back and forth to be on the right side of the crowd - often they were against the crowd - and thus while out of power were perceived of as the worst of both worlds - neither constant, nor opportunistic.

However, on the precipice, each became the only obvious leader to turn to, for the simple reason that each had proven a higher constancy through the political wars, and had repeatedly uttered prophethetic warnings as to the needs of the time.

And each spun these as a simple story - Churchill the story of Britain as the exemplar of freedom for all peoples - even if history must be strained to come to such a conclusion - and FDR that the strength of America was not in metals, nor even in the land - but in the spirit of the people to meet any emergency.

Bush was a parasite on FDR and Churchill's narratives - letting the press and others say what he never actually did - and allowing others to project onto Bush the kind of politician who would set aside petty personal goals for the greater good. But Bush never did aver that he was going to do what he wanted, when he wanted, as he wanted, for the good of who he wanted. His view was that once elected, since he could not be recalled or removed - he had absolute power, so long as he passed a simple midterm test whose passing grade was 49%.

Suddenly those who write are discovering that Bush is at once - rigid and inflexible when it comes to his own profit - and a complete opportunist when it comes to the national mood - something like, for example Calvin Coolidge or Stanley Baldwin - good at winning domestic elections and little else. What they are following is opportunism of their own - the polls tell them that there are more readers who want to read that Bush is bad than want to read that Bush is good. And so they follow the crowd. But they carry with them the same solutions they always had.

And this is, in the end, why Bush is so popular with the press - he is one of them - with a hidden rigid agenda, pursued by wild tacks to stay ahead of the popular mood.