What you heard is not what you get after the campaign

In Great Myths of the Great Depression you read about the attempts by the federal government to shore up the economy. Most failed, and these failed Hoover programs of the final years of his presidency are what FDR built his Big New Deal on.

"Though modern myth claims that the free market “self-destructed” in 1929, government policy was the debacle’s principal culprit. If this crash had been like previous ones, the hard times would have ended in two or three years at the most, and likely sooner than that. But unprecedented political bungling instead prolonged the misery for over 10 years.

. . . The [1932] platform of the Democratic Party, whose ticket Roosevelt headed, declared, “We believe that a party platform is a covenant with the people to
be faithfully kept by the party entrusted with power.” It called for a 25-percent reduction in federal spending, a balanced federal budget, a sound gold currency “to
be preserved at all hazards,” the removal of government from areas that belonged more appropriately to private enterprise, and an end to the “extravagance” of Hoover’s farm programs. This is what candidate Roosevelt promised, but it bears
no resemblance to what President Roosevelt actually delivered.

Is there ever a presidential campaign in which the candidates don't tell us that they will cut government spending, get out of our business, and end waste? After the election, we voters always put that sign on our backsides that says, "Kick me again."