TP, you are right that we have to look at TR, WW, FDR, Truman, Ike, etc. etc. 

What we also have to do is to be realistic about how this all began.  We may need to go all the way back to Adams.  But while we are at it we also need to look at the way that some of the others handled things.  Take a close look at Calvin Cooledge.  He faced a far deeper recession than FDR but it only lasted a few months and gave way to a huge boom.  He did nothing to try and fix things.

Today we have to undo some ideas that we have and that means we have to look at both parties and see who did wrong and what that wrong was.  As they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  When we begin we Republicans have to set aside the Democrats for a while and look at our own.  We come back to the Democrats when we have taken a good look at our own and accept what is true about them.

For this we Republicans begin with Lincoln.  We look at our radical roots and we have to say clearly that they were wrong.  The next biggie is TR.  While his ideas about child labor and some other issues were spot on they were not federal issues nor were the fixes constitutional.  It is without a doubt one of the hardest things to look at and take the constitutional stand.

The same is true about the subject of national parks and federal land.  These are not constitutional either.  States can do these things but the Feds can't.  This would mean that the Valley Forge part would still be owned by PA and PA would have to raise money for it.

However, that would not be that hard.  When in the 30s there was no money to refurbish the USS Constitution the money was raised by school children who gave up their milk money to pay for the work.  Often more money is raised by private contrabutions than either the states or the feds can porvide.

We also have to admit that Hoover began the distructive programs that FDR ran with and that the Great Depression should be blamed on both.

The same things are true for our other heros in the WH.  Ike and Reagan were both flawed when it comes to expanding govt.  They were both motivated by good intentions.  They both hurt us in the long run, Ike more than Reagan.

The beat goes on and on.  We Republicans have to be honest about things and we have not been for a very long time.  Today we lionize Lincoln, TR, Ike, and Reagan.  We ignore Cooledge and some of the others who are now forgotten.  We blame Hoover, Nixon, Ford, and Bush.  These are all wrong attitudes.

We all tend to see things as all black or all white when in fact things are never all anything.

gary

TP, while I understand your approach and see some merit there, I am not sure that we can get to where we want if we do not do both.  That is while we start with Obama and his health care nonsense and work back, we also have to attack the attitudes that begin with the Radical Republicans that we know today are the forerunners of the progressives.  My approach is a two pronged pincer.

We work do undo from where we are back and we begin to undo the bad attitudes that start in the mid 1800s.  We do have to keep in mind that the political thinking that allows for this health care nonsense is rooted in the idea that the feds are above any law.

gary

TP, I came to the conclusion a while ago that we need to not only roll back the progressive bs that has been foisted upon us but that we also need to attack the ideas that made that possible.

We can pick on a lot of guys here and one of my favorites is TR.  He really was a bum in that he did not give a damn at all about the Constitution.  His efforts were all about fixing things without regard to what the govt should be doing.  This was on of those watershed deals where a precident was set to do what is good even if you have to do it in a wrong way.  Sort of a precursor to the ends justify the means.  While I like most of what he did I do not like how he did them.

Take child labor laws as an example.  They had to be done.  There just is no place in the Constitution where they could be done.  He should have taken the time to amend the Constitution to give Congress the authority to regulate the age at which someone could work outside of the home.  This would leave the family farm untouched but stop the abuses of the factories.  This would have also limited Congress to only addressing child labor.

gary

Another example of abuse of powers.  These are things we need to renounce big time.

gary