摘要：It was the popular media that first made the comparison between an Obama presidency and that of Franklin Roosevelt. The media did not wait until President Obama took office, but began the comparisons in earnest after the presidential election of 2008, perhaps most famously on Time Magazine’s November 24, 2008 cover depicting a photoshopped Barack Obama in a characteristic pose of the New Deal President along with an article titled “the New New Deal.” Most of the comparisons had to do with the fallout from the economic near collapse of September 2008 amid reports of the second Great Depression and the expectation at that time of a legislative agenda suited for the present times, as the New Deal has been historically portrayed was for its times.1 And though FDR presided over a period of upheaval in national economics, his presidency also set the stage for a period of profound change in constitutional interpretation leading to a revolution in regulatory development which redefined the role of the state in American life. This period was made all the more dramatic by the related conflicts between the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and the Congress. The media may have had less of the latter on their minds when these comparisons were made, but as the Obama Administration progressed, it became apparent to constitutional scholars that the regulatory developments in the areas of health care reform and financial regulation were creating some in-oteresting substantive interactions between the two periods, which in turn resulted in new interest in examining the constitutional developments of the New Deal era.s
