Took me a moment, but you mean FDR, right? LBJ didn't hold national office until 1937, and Patrick Lyndon Nugent (LBJ's only grandson) is active as a Democrat.

^{"Sí che dal fatto il dir non sia diverso."}

-Dante

i was thinking along the exact same lines earlier today, walking to the train to work. the democratic party has totally abandoned the working class. totally. and for that matter the middle class. why anyone would vote for them at this point is beyond me. we really havent had anything close to liberal in the office since LBJ and he was far from perfect. we need a new party, one that is truely left of center with no apoligies....

Two and a half years back, I was talking to a couple who get all their news from Fox, dismiss all other sources as "the liberal media" which tell liberal lies, and think government just gives everything away to people who won't work. They help look after her mother, who can no longer be left on her own at all. They're upset about the fact that they would have to use her assets for an assisted care facility prior to receiving government assistance ("My daddy didn't work so that the government could come take his house" is the phrasing). When they started mocking my liberal political views, I started talking about my high hopes for HR676, expanded Medicare for All. First, they got very quiet. Then, they started asking questions, including what the chance were that it would pass. I said I was hopeful because there were about 100 Democratic co-sponsors in the House. They didn't say another word against Democrats.

Combined with the Republican economic train wreck, a genuine health care bill would have given the Democrats a lock on the majority for at least 20 years. Instead, Obama gave us the medical business and insurance profit subsidy plan.

The thing that I note about this and so much other critique is the degree to which it focuses on external actors. There's a near total absence of individuals working collectively - which is pretty damned odd, given the institution central to the story. The thing's a co-operative - good government policy was a potent enabler, but the enterprise was fundamentally built on the backs of a group of people working together. Call me a cynical bastard but I tend to think that if one wants good policy, one had better be willing to work as hard and as collectively as they did. It doesn't come out of wishing and it doesn't come out of the politics of opposition (i.e., what one is against rather than what one is willing to do).

“Easy to say what one is against. Hard to do what one is for." ~ not-Richard Haass

to recover his government is to take the gloves off and play hardball with the Right. They are playing for keeps and he seems incapable of contesting the ground. He needs to move Left into Socialist territory, and quickly. Beck/Limbaugh/Murdoch et al will scream, but so what? They'll scream anyway, no matter what he does. He might as well have the game as well as the name.

[When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn.

Chorus:
And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.

Repeat Chorus:

Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.

Repeat Chorus:

When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am.

Repeat Chorus:]

From notes at http://www.jpshrine.org/lyrics/songs/jpparadise.html, ["I wrote it for my father, mainly so he would know I was a songwriter. Paradise was a real place in Kentucky, and while I was away in the Army in Germany, my father sent me a newspaper article telling how the coal company had bought the place out. It was a real Disney-looking town. It sat on a river, had two stores, and there was one black man in town, Bubba Short, who looked like Uncle Remus and hung out with my Granddaddy Hamm, my mom's dad, all day, fishing for catfish.
Then the bulldozers came in and wiped it all off the map.
When I recorded the song, I brought a tape of the record to my dad; I had to borrow a reel-to-reel machine to play it for him. When the song came on, he went into the next room and sat in the dark while it was on. I asked him why, and he said he wanted to pretend it was on the jukebox." ~John Prine]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyPTIOJuWws