@Cycloptichorn,
Yes I do. FDR was the most left of center we had elected up to his time, but he still promoted and defended the basic American values of his day. He would never in his wildest dreams presume to diminish America in the eyes of another nation, he practiced fiscal responsibility, he recognized the virtue in working for what we have as opposed to a handout, he built assurances and stopgaps into the social security system he initiated and I honestly think he didn't realize what an enormous and unmanageable monstrosity it would become.
FDR said a lot of stuff that Obama has repeated in various ways, but can you imagine Barack Obama saying:
We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.
Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.
The true conservative is the man who has a real concern for injustices and takes thought against the day of reckoning.
In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.
"We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic. . . . Where we have been the truest and most consistent in obeying its precepts, we have attained the greatest measure of contentment and prosperity."
"I hope that you have re-read the Constitution of the United States in these past few weeks. Like the Bible, it ought to be read again and again."
"I am certain that the rank and file of patriotic Republicans do not realize the nature of this threat. They should remember, and we must remember, what the collaborative understanding between Communism and Nazism has done to the processes of democracy abroad... "
"Those forces hate democracy and Christianity as two phases of the same civilization. They oppose democracy because it is Christian. They oppose Christianity because it preaches democracy. Their objective is to prevent democracy from becoming strong."
"The Nazis are as ruthless as the Communists in the denial of God."
FDR said them all and frequently wove such concepts into his speeches. He did preach a social gospel, but never outside responsibility and personal accountability--he was not at all interested in giving away the store.
In some ways LBJ was left of Roosevelt and Carter left of LBJ. It is hard to say how any of those would have governed in this day and time and with the current Congress to deal with, however.
And LBJ was way to the right of George W. Bush for that matter.
