I've gotten a lot of questions about the column, "Old fashioned Democrats." People say to me, "I couldn't figure out if you were knocking the Democrats or the Republicans." The answer is, both. A few of my fellow Democrats have said to me, "You sound more like a Republican than a Democrat to me." That caused me to ask them, "Where to you think all these (majority) Republican votes in Missouri and Arkansas, chief among the heartland states of the nation, are coming from?" The answer is simple: the votes are coming from former Democrats. They had to agree. The difference with me, and those who have fled the Democratic Party, is that I believe in taking a stand as a "real" Democrat, rather than tucking my tail and leaving the party to the socialist/communist-wanna-bes, and drunks (with power and unearned millions) such as Senator Ted Kennedy.

A real Democrat has always been good for this country. To be genuine, such a politician for the common man must be a Democrat by thought word and deed like FDR, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and even men who never made president, like the late Senator Huey Long, and men who never ran for office, yet worked for the common people as political "bosses," such as the late E. H. Crump of Memphis. There hasn't been an effective Democrat in the White House since FDR, with Johnson's civil rights legislation, the result of his incredible political ability to defeat members of his own party, and to win congressional approval of the Republicans, as an important exception.

When Roosevelt came to the presidency, the average American was moving rapidly toward the cynical conclusion, as he is today, that there was one law for the corporations and another for the individual, one law for the rich, another for the poor. When I use the word "rich," I mean someone with at least a net worth of 10 unearned (inherited) million US dollars. When FDR came to the presidency, the corporations (chief among them the oil cartels and New York banks and trust companies) carried on their questionable business practices in a kind of "twilight zone" between state and federal authority, where neither was seemingly able to reach them, and when a body so revered, and not yet so obviously politically corruptible, as the Supreme court admitted that Congress was powerless to check the growth and extension of the power of organized wealth, the common man began to wonder if he would have to revolt as they were doing in Europe at the time. The United States was never closer to a social revolution than at the time Roosevelt became president. Roosevelt recognized that the fundamental principles of democratic government--equal justice and national solidarity--were under attack.

The 99-day session of the 73rd Congress which began March 9, 1933, witnessed the most daring presidential leadership in American history. Congress was passing laws to FDR's order, and they never tried to conceal that fact. Never before had the American government so closely approached meltdown, only to be saved with real Democratic leadership. When Congress adjourned June 16, after complying with all of FDR's principal recommendations, the nation had been placed squarely upon a new path, and a Russian instigated communist revolution never got to first base in our country, except in Hollywood and in the self-anointed "elite intellectual" cocktail circuit in New York. What is it with Hollywood and its anti-Americanism? It reminds one of prostitutes and loan sharks following an army, always predictable.

Mr. Roosevelt saved banks by first closing them, and then reopening them with guarantees. He saved millions of Americans from starvation by providing federal grants, creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, and stoppage of foreclosures, to name a few of his immediate acts. These were just some of his emergency relief measures. They were followed by politically daring steps of the most far-reaching economic innovations: a farm relief law; creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority; and the passage of the National Recovery Act. It was also FDR who made the decision to abandon the gold standard and move toward revaluation of the dollar. Can you imagine trying to accomplish any one of those monumental acts with so many shortsighted cretins in today's Congress?

President Johnson was the last Democratic president to make any FDR-type moves exclusively for the benefit of the common man in America. "What about JFK?" you ask. He passed no major legislation directly affecting the betterment of the lot of the working poor in these United States. In fact, John Kennedy was sold to us like any other "manufactured" product. Without TV and PR and a little vote stealing in Chicago, there would have been no JFK in the White House. His college grades, by the way, were no better than Gore, Bush, and Kerry's, and without their families' money and influence none of them, on their prep school grades alone, would have been admitted to an Ivy League university. President Kennedy's legacy is "Camelot" (a silly Hollywood invention) and the failed "Bay of Pigs" debacle, along with letting the French suck him into beginning the Vietnam War, all fine examples of the so-called "brains" around JFK. Except for President Kennedy's brutal, and unsolved, murder, we would think him an ordinary President, who got us into a doomed "undeclared" war that left 55,000, mostly poor, soldiers dead.

My jaundiced view of "high stakes" politics could be that I'm just turning into an elderly "crank," one, by definition, said to be an eccentric and highly irritable individual. OK, but one might occasionally exhibit only "crank-like" behavior without being a real crank? But, stay with me on this, when I was in college, and training white laboratory rats to run experimental mazes (Skinner boxes), I never formed opinions about rats as political personalities. I just unemotionally noted (as one does as a trained observer at a Wal-Mart or airport departure lounges) what they did in the course of performing the experiments assigned to them and to me. I'd like to be able to do that with politicians, just observe them and report what they do, but I can't. The reason lies with the politicians themselves. They have the gift of language, which causes them to weigh political gain over the truth. White rats have no language, nor do they have "political" minds. Therefore, a white rat is much more trustworthy than a politician, when it comes to predicting behavior. But, I've already voted for too many rats in my time.

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.