<strong><em>"God watches out for drunks, little children and the United States of America."</em></strong>

I don't remember the first time I heard that, but it made me laugh knowingly. All throughout our country's history, in its hour of greatest need, there have been great presidents. In the beginning, when we weren't even sure what kind of country we would have, there was George Washington to refuse a crown and set precedent after precedent for the way presidents should behave. In 1860, with the Union falling apart, there was Abraham Lincoln to hold it together.

At the end of the Gilded Age, when the robber barons had all but raped the country, there was Theodore Roosevelt to step up with his big stick and shut them down.

[caption id="attachment_1775" align="alignright" width="199" caption="The unfinished portrait"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/20121007_17.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1775" title="20121007_17" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/20121007_17-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

And then there was FDR.

Ever since the age of Reagan, conservatives have done their worst to downplay the effect of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 12 years in the White House. They claim the New Deal did nothing to lift the United States out of the Great Depression, that the economy didn't really turn around until World War II started. They call him a socialist or even a fascist, but the one thing none of them seem to want to admit is that if Roosevelt hadn't done what he did, it's likely we would have gone down the same road as Germany, Italy or even Russia.

He was a wealthy man, no doubt, but his own misfortune -- he contracted polio when he was nearly 40 years old -- gave him great empathy for all the people who were suffering during the Depression.

Contrary to what you'll hear from right wingers these days, Roosevelt didn't start the welfare state. The money people got from the government so they could eat was money they worked for. Sure, maybe some were only doing things like sweeping the sidewalks, but FDR understood that people needed to do something to feel that they had earned the money.

Yes, there was another recession in 1937, but that was because Roosevelt -- a traditionalist at heart -- tried to keep a campaign promise and balance the federal budget. Austerity was the last thing the economy needed.

It was his true empathy for the poor and suffering that made the Democrats a majority party for a generation. That they don't really seem to be one anymore speaks more to the fact that they have tried to cater to the wealthy, and as Harry Truman once said, give the voters a choice between a Republican and a Republican and they'll vote for the Republican every time.

FDR had a real connection with the people, and he did a better job of communicating with them in his Fireside Chats than any other president before him or since him. He was the one man who could make a reluctant nation prepare for a war he knew would one day come to them, and he was the one who led them through the dark days after Pearl Harbor all the way up to his death on April 12, 1945.

The <em>New York Times</em> said it best in a eulogy editorial, telling its readers that a hundred years in the future, Americans would get down on their knees and thank God that Franklin Roosevelt had been in the White House when America had to stand up to barbarism.

Some will, of course, but what amazes me more than 67 years after his death is how much his legacy has been subjected to revisionist history by the descendants of the people on the far right who hated him beyond all reason. Oh, they don't say the same things the haters did while he was alive. For one thing, all the ridiculous lies about how Roosevelt was secretly a Jew wouldn't fly anymore. What anti-semitism that remains in this country is pretty much underground these days.

But the whole idea that we should help people who are down on their luck has come under attack. It's amazing how many people treat a third-rate thinker like Ayn Rand as if she were a philosophical equal to Christ himself. People talk about makers and takers and look at the people who are struggling as if they were somehow morally inferior to those who are successful. When a major party candidate talks of 47 percent of Americans as people he could never convince to take responsibility for their own lives, it says as much about our country as it does about the man who said it.

Fifty years ago, Mitt Romney would have condemned himself to the far right fringe with that remark.

Today he's probably got one chance in three of being elected president on Tuesday.

America has certainly changed.

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