Conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan pointed out that they would have been happy to run on the same 1932 Democratic Party platform on which Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his successful run for the presidency.

Where Goldwater and Reagan missed was that they failed to carry the sequence forward in the evolving circumstances with the only candidate in U.S. history to win four presidential elections.

FDR proved himself to be an effective pragmatist and therein lay the success of the program he christened a "New Deal for the American people" at his party's Chicago convention.  Once that he took office Roosevelt proved flexible and America benefited as new programs were initiated and the trademark economic concept of the party's platform was scrapped by the new man in office.

Initially operating under the conventional wisdom, Roosevelt and his brain trust advocated government frugality with tight budget restraint as a means of getting America moving amid the Great Depression.