Hey it turns out that the secret to electoral success isn't trashing your own supporters, your own legacy and pandering to people who will never vote for you.
Who knew?
The Conservative Party in the UK never did learn that lesson, during 13 years of opposition they kept electing leaders who apologised for being Tories and agreed with all the premises of the Labour Party (the terrible 1980s*, aren't Tories evil racist homophobes etc) before having to abrupt U-Turns before the general election and appeal to the core vote on immigration and crime after having already implied that doing that is reactionary and nasty.
* Historically Labour have been quite good at retroactively painting periods of Tory rule as being oppressive, impoverished and shameful even when the figures and contemporary feelings showed the opposite was true. Not many people seem to realise that the 1950s were a an era of growth and prosperity or that in the 1930s the Baldwin government largely avoided the extreme economic decline that hit the USA and continental Europe.
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The Depression really preceded the Baldwin government. At that time it was notionally a National Government.
But the point remains that we escaped the depression sooner because we didn't spend our way out like Roosevelt tried to do.
That's all true, but the National Government never gets credited with leading us out of the Depression in the way Roosevelt is lauded.
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