Half-baked thoughts: Are we repeating the mistakes of the Jazz Age?

Because people (and especially journalists) innately seek points of reference from the past in order to understand the present, the administration of Barack Obama has naturally drawn plenty of comparisons to former presidents and eras. Are we living through a revival of FDR's New Deal, or the pessimism of the Carter years? Is the president an heir to Bill Clinton's frequently base-infuriating triangulation, or Ronald Reagan's knack for using an ideological facade to govern from a position of compromise? Or is he, y'know, Mecha-StalinHitler?


One comparison I haven't heard often is with the era of Woodrow Wilson and his Republican successors (Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover). I've been reading William E. Leuchtenburg's "The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-32" recently, and keep finding myself startled at how relevant the descriptions of the 1910s and '20s feel to today. The parallels I'm seeing are not so much between Wilson and Obama (though a few of those, some more superficial than others, certainly exist) as they are between the political and social climates of the respective eras.