"Are you saying the American electorate is stupid?"
Stupid....I don't know about stupid, but the electorate is doubtlessly gullible. This is true of any country. Even our founding fathers recognized that, hence why we're a representative democracy with many unelected offices (supreme court, the senate originally, etc). The US isn't and has never been a a pure democracy.
My parents loved FDR, and even they admit he probably would have made himself King if he thought he could get away with it. He was a great president in some ways, but he was the dangerous sort of great who always wanted more and more power. It's probably just as well that he died before WW2 ended.
That said, something had to be done in 1932, and Social Security and programs like the TVA did much to help out many people. Laissez-faire presidents like Hoover and Harding are uniformly remembered as among our worst. At the risk of being branded a socialist, I'll say that I think smaller government isn't *always* better for the country. The problem isn't necessarily Big Government in and of itself--it's when Big Government keeps getting bigger and bigger like a cancer. We tried "small government" once before, with the Articles of Confederation, and it failed miserably.
J_A_B
