Barack Obama entered the presidency with millennial expectations—fed by analogies between the Great Depression and the new Great Recession—that he would be “another Lincoln” or, more often, “another FDR.” “Newsweek” even photoshopped an image of the two on its cover. I don’t think it needs much elaborating that, neither at home nor abroad, has Obama proved a reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt. However, I think an analogy between the Roosevelt and Obama presidencies, c. 1938 and 2014, has something to offer. Simple dichotomies between domestic and foreign policy should be avoided–but if Roosevelt was tested at home in 1933, he was tested globally in 1938 as the world tried appeasement and then skidded toward war. A man of consistencies as well as contradictions, FDR was a consistent liberal who believed that presidential leadership could change the direction of the country as well as the world. The year 1938 was a severe testing time because his New Deal, after half a decade of of economic progress, had lost steam as the country relapsed into a new recession. Through the force of global events and the evolution of his foreign policy vision, Roosevelt gradually changed the subject from domestic doldrums to international threats, a gradual process completed when—after Pearl Harbor—“Dr. New Deal” was replaced by “Dr. Win the War.” The analogy between 1938 and 2014 is not perfect yet interesting. After six years, two liberal presidencies had run out of steam domestically—Roosevelt’s because failing fully to end the Depression he inherited from Herbert Hoover, Obama’s for complicated politico-economic reasons including failure fully to end the Recession that he inherited from George W. Bush. The other parallel is a world situation careening out of control—now in the Mideast and Eastern Europe, then in Europe and the Far East. FDR had failed to make much of a foreign policy impact up to that point because of his priority on domestic recovery and deference to the traditional world powers that gave the world Munich. Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama, on the other hand, has his fingerprints much more on the current crisis, by virtue of the failings of his global “apology tours,” his “leading from behind” in places like Libya,Syria, and Iraq, and his naïve pushing “the reset button” of U.S.-Russian relations in a way that Vladimir Putin took as a green light for aggression. All of these points border on the obvious. But one comparison between then and now is less marked upon. In both 1938 and 2014, the liberal vision seemed to have topped out. The leading liberal economists of that era were talking about a “new normal” of 10 percent unemployment; those of this era are whispering about a “new normal” of just 2 percent annual GDP growth—half the historical, post-recession norm. Neither then nor now has the public shown much liking for liberals preaching a new austerity while still lacking a compelling vision of how to meet new international threats to the American Dream. Of course, World War II cut the Gordian Knot for American liberalism then by both restoring full employment and catapulting a progressive nation into world politics. Walter Isaacson in “Time” magazine has just pontificated on how “Obama Can Save His Legacy.” Significantly, however, Isaac—in urging Obama to copy TR’s “Bully Pulpit” and end his posture of “standing above the fray”—focuses entirely on initiatives to revitalize “American economic opportunity.” Apparently, Isaacson either himself lacks a dynamic foreign policy vision (including a new commitment to human rights) or can’t imagine Obama under any circumstances embracing one. Could a repeat of the 9/11 attack, which reprised Japan’s 12/7 attack, prove a wild card and game changer revitalizing the Obama presidency? Perhaps. But it seems unlikely for two related reasons. First, Obama has proven himself an “anti-FDR” who polarizes the public (as FDR also did sometimes) but without then unifying it around a new consensus. Second, FDR had a real knowledge of world affairs, going back to his youthful travels to Europe and his service in Woodrow Wilson’s WWI government. Obama may think he understands the twenty-first century world, but the world he understands seems more like a videogame simulation than the real one. Is Obama’s failure personal and the result of what political scientist James Barber classified as “an active negative” presidential personality (like Richard Nixon, among others) characterized as energetic but joyless, aggressive, highly rigid, and narcissistically self-centered? Or is it the wider failure of a political class: America’s “new class” leadership which identifies with non-American elites yet whose “progressivism” thinly veils a provincial notion of how the world really works? Since the time of Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad,” observers have been amused by Yankee confidence that all that’s needed to solve the world’s problems is up-to-date plumbing and a dose of liberal optimism. Fused with both unprecedented power and sophistication, the American formula worked remarkably well for a half century after World War II. It’s no longer working, and its naivety is no longer amusing. Neither Barack Obama or the media and academic elites that used to fawn over him have any real answers. Nor do Republicans. One can envision a 2016 presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney decided on the issue of who better can manage the mess.