As with most born in the decade after World War II to parents who understood what the New Deal and the GI Bill meant for their lives, the era of a forward thinking government started to end on that bleak day in November, 1963, but that is not true.

Our inspirational president was taken from us, but his successor was a true New Dealer with a mission. And after the Kennedy-inspired Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were signed into law, President Johnson moved on to a war on poverty and creating a Great Society.

Those dreams did not end because of superior advocacy against change from the Republican Party, but because of the tragic mistake in southeast Asia which tore the country in two, leaving what President Johnson wanted to accomplish in the dust and President Nixon in its wake.


It has taken us forty years, but it appears we may finally be back on track. There is no way to be certain only a month into this administration, but the question seems worth considering, particularly after the president's speech to a joint session of Congress and the transformational budget put forth later in the week. It is this: are we seeing greatness here? Are living through a presidency that will change this country in the way that Franklin Roosevelt's did?

Nobody in the summer of 1933 could possibly have known that, except for two aberrational years in the 1950s, the Democratic Party would control Congress until the 1980s and that the next Republican president (Eisenhower) would embrace the New Deal. We can make no such predictions either, but it is absolutely possible we are at the dawn of a new age in the same way our forebears were 76 years ago.

One of the miracles of the internet age is the opportunity to read the views of thoughtful people not enveloped in the beltway haze or the need and desire to create controversy out of nothing and those sober views of a public looking for direction, guidance, hope and a plan to get us out of the mess we are in, are what makes it possible to stand back a bit and look at what is happening, with greater perspective than we have otherwise been afforded.

One of my favorites among them posts here on TPM and, in the greatest traditions of our best columnists, wondered whether sites such as this one would soon disappear with too little to complain about. That clever way of noting what an amazing month or so we have just ended has me thinking about what greatness means in terms of a presidency.

I do not think anyone expects that the simple change of presidents will cure our ills. We elected (in a way) a complete fool to occupy the presidency for eight years, twenty years after doing the same thing. That followed the presidency of as corrupt and potentially despotic president as we have ever had, followed by two somewhat well-meaning lightweights, and in between the two utter dolts, we had two others presidents who for various reasons were unable to rise to what the occasion required.

As a result, we have found ourselves in dire straits. Joe McGinnis' once famous book not only described the odd way in which we had come to "market" presidential candidates, but warned us of the consequences of electing them this way. That George W. Bush was considered, by a significant number of people, to be more qualified for the presidency than, first, Sen John McCain, and then Vice President Gore and Senator John Kerry, makes McGinnis' point but, for today's purposes, the essential issue is how much the country has to pay for such decisionmaking.

So George W. Bush's only gift to his country may have been to make the presidency now underway to become possible. It may not be a coincidence that Lincoln followed the arguably worst president of all time, James Buchanan, and Franklin Roosevelt came to clean up the mess made by the hopelessly out of touch Herbert Hoover.

Hence:

We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before. The cost of health care eats up more and more of our savings each year, yet we keep delaying reform. Our children will compete for jobs in a global economy that too many of our schools do not prepare them for. And though all these challenges went unsolved, we still managed to spend more money and pile up more debt, both as individuals and through our government, than ever before.

In other words, we have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.

Well that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here.

Now is the time to act boldly and wisely - to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity. Now is the time to jumpstart job creation, re-start lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down.

Nothing like this has been said by any President speaking from that podium in that room since President Johnson told Congress and the nation:

The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong -- deadly wrong -- to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. I have not the slightest doubt what will be your answer....

But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

And we shall overcome.

As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil, I know how agonizing racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society. But a century has passed, more than a hundred years since the Negro was freed. And he is not fully free tonight.

It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great President of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation; but emancipation is a proclamation, and not a fact. A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since equality was promised. And yet the Negro is not equal. A century has passed since the day of promise. And the promise is un-kept.

The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American. For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated? How many white families have lived in stark poverty? How many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we've wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror?

And so I say to all of you here, and to all in the nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future.

This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all, all black and white, all North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They're our enemies, not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too -- poverty, disease, and ignorance: we shall overcome.

That is what presidential leadership is all about. The President, contrary to the opinion of the prior administration, is not a monarch who can "do" this or fix that. The President's authority in the main comes from his role as a leader of the national debate. When the President points his country in the right direction, toward our better angels trying to make this country live up to the best instincts of our nature, and the ideals upon which we became a nation, he approaches greatness.

Not that everyone will see it that way, of course. I don't want to live in a country where everyone thinks the same thing, but the opinions of the selfish, the deluded, the foolish, need not be allowed to get in the way of progress, especially when we need to move forward with, as they say, all deliberate speed.

This President knows what he is up against. We know that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are channeling the GOP of 1933 and repeating the attacks their predecessors made on FDR and the New Deal.

They hated President Roosevelt. They accused him of every bad thing they could think of and their descendants still hate him today. The rest of us---a huge majority of us---know better.

And as I watch President Obama and listen to him proposing the way back, and then hear the whining cries of the irrelevant among us, President Roosevelt's response to them, weeks before his re-election in 1936 proved that when properly educated and led by a president with vision the voters of this country know far better, almost sings to me:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me‹and I welcome their hatred.

That is greatness. A country that can tell the difference between a real leader, and one who pretends to be one, such as the Great Reagan, is a healthy one, and one which will, in the end, prosper and lead. Years from now, perhaps, we can say that, we, too, were fortunate to have had the same sort of president who restored this nation as the land of the free and the brave of the best of our history.