You were right...

... it did take only three posts before this fight erupted again.

I'll do my best to respond to your post, but it isn't what I wanted to post about.

I certainly can't argue that FDR is more "radical" than Obama... FDR was doing what had never been done before, and he was doing it because nothing the Hoover Administration did was working for the nearly four years prior to his inauguration.  A quarter of the population was out of work, and had been for more than three years.  The rate of bank failures was more than 29% nationally, but in some states that rate was as high as 50%.  Farm foreclosures were as high as 75% in areas where, without farms, there was nothing else to do for income.  The boom-bust cycle of the American economy typically ran on a 7 to 14 year cycle (1790 to 1932), with the longest depression lasting more than 20 years... that's 20 years of negative economic growth every year.  How could Obama possibly hope to compete with that?  This was the worst financial crisis the country had ever seen, and was so big it crippled the entire world's economy for nearly 10 years.

Frankly, if I can't compare the two men and their policies, then neither can you... the parallel doesn't exist.  Nothing about the nation's current economic woes can even come close to what people were suffering in 1932... nothing.  Do you see my point of response to your question?  I don't want Obama to try and "out radical" FDR by re-writing the Federal regulations on banking insurance, because FDIC still works.  I don't need Obama to come up with a new program (or host of programs) to put unemployed millions back to work, because we have UEI and State-regulated equivalents that still work.  We don't need massive million-man public works projects today because the 12 million unemployed (all with existing assistance and support) are only 8% of the American workforce and less than 1% of the total population, while the 13 million unemployed of 1932 constituted nearly 12% of the overall population, and more than 25% of the workforce.  The average time an American spends unemployed now is less than 9 months... in 1932 it was measured in years.  Today, we don't have thousands of starving farmers walking from Oklahoma to California looking for work, or crowds of 10,000 people lining up for soup hand-outs in Chicago's city streets.  Sorry... the comparison doesn't work like that.

The paradigm of "New Deal" was unique, I think... but there is no denying that other Presidents have tried to copy what FDR did.  Johnson did, and in 1968 (even though he didn't run) Johnson would have lost the election.  Carter did, and in 1980 he did lose the election.  Yes, the effort to follow FDR's footsteps has been made, and it has failed each and every time... because the parallel didn't exist.

That, my friend, is the essence of my "proof" to this point.  We've never gone back to that sort of economic crisis since... so something worked.  The SEC, FDIC, SSI, AAA, all the "permanent" and lasting programs or agencies of the New Deal that still exist continue to do what they were intended to do:  prevent another "great depression".  All the short-term, alphabet-soup programs that were intended to give limited or partial relief to those most in need either worked, were determined to be un-Constitutional, or were shut down by the end of WWII (or far sooner) since the symptoms that they were intended to fix no longer existed.  That is why I still contend that New Deal as a Presidential "policy agenda" ended by 1943, while the New Deal era continued until 1980, because so many saw an opportunity to gain political advantage by using what had worked in the past again in the present.

By arguing that if New Deal worked in 1932, then it must surely work now and that I am inconsistent by denying this, you could as well be saying that since Gen. Curtis LeMay had such success with the strategic bombing plans he employed over Japan in 1945, we should have opted to utilize the same strategy in 2003 and fuse the Iraqi landscape into blackened glass over the course of months of perpetual bombing runs before ever setting a boot down on the ground.  We defeated Japan without ever setting foot on the main islands in 1945... why couldn't we have done that each and every time we fought since?  Because it wasn't the model we needed to follow, that's why.

Now, if you want to talk about FDR and his failings, we can do that too.  He was incapable of understanding that Keyenes and his economic theory said that spending should go up while taxes went down.  He continually sought to keep taxes high (especially on the richest portion of Americans) in a forlorn hope of having a balanced budget... and that mentality remained entrenched until Reagan came to office in 1981.  In fact, it remains entrenched to this day... and that IS a legacy of both FDR and the "liberal, progressive" agenda that Wilson, Truman and every Democrat since has maintained and strengthened.  This false assumption (or misunderstanding, if you will) has an easy and very specific counter in Ronald Reagan and the success of his 1981 tax cuts... and THAT is the counter to what FDR and every other Democrat since has failed to grasp.

He was incapable of compromise (I think), at least politically... and while this trait may have served him well as a war-time President, it didn't make for a smooth-running domestic agenda and forced many representative office holders into untenable positions by default.  He intentionally placed people into cabinet positions that either couldn't do the job or couldn't work effectively with other cabinet members, just so he could remain the focus of public attention.  This worked well when things were going well, but he paid the price when things went wrong (NRA, the Court-stacking scandal, etc).  Presidents that followed that example paid the price, as well... Richard Nixon jumps to mind.

I will openly admit that a 80% and higher tax bracket and astronomical corporate tax rates (more than 14 of them) kept the recovery from the depression at a far slower pace then it needed to be.  I cannot deny that there WAS a recession in 1938 (called the Roosevelt Recession) that resulted from a demand for a balanced budget by a new Republican majority in the Congress.  I disagree with you on why that recession happened (thus, the perpetual argument that the "great depression" lasted through WWII and didn't, in fact end in 1934), but it did happen... along with five other recessions since then, the most recent in 2008.  I maintain that no depression has occurred since 1934, though... thus ending a 140-year cycle of boom-bust economics that plagued America since its inception, even though you and I still seem to disagree on WHY that cycle ended when it did.

On my list of Presidential rankings, there is an association with Presidents that embraced compromise and watered-down actions and their position at the bottom of the list.  It isn't the ONLY criteria, but it is a big factor.  My worst Presidents have all been "compromisers" of the first order... and no one can say FDR was that.  He was, at the time of his death, one of the most popular Presidents of all time, and he won resounding election victories time and time again (four times, to be exact).  I am STILL of the opinion that (removing WWII from the equation, as you asked) he was elected to fix a national crisis by a population that demanded action... any action... and he delivered by doing what had never been done before and even some things that were deemed later to be un-Constitutional in order to answer that demand.  Since his time in office, the nation has seen an era of economic growth and success that surpasses anything that came before... and while I am NOT giving him credit for all of that, I can't say that any of his policies or actions as President prevented or even hampered that success in later decades.

I understand that you are of the opinion that all success since 1932 happened in spite of FDR... and that is the part of this discussion that we seem unable to get past.