As an historian, I see one of historical analysis most important values is to give us perspective on where we are and also where we should struggle to be.

Today, we look at skyrocketing gas prices, wars raging through the Middle East, economic stagnation, and reactionaries trying to profit from an economic crisis that their policies created Dejavu all over again?  Maybe not, if we fight to to build peoples movements that take seriously the themes in these  two crucially important videos from Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 and 1944 presidential campaigns.
 
The first is Roosevelt's famous defense of his administration's achievements and  his complete repudiation of the rightwing Republican governments that had brought about the depression.

 Notice that Roosevelt does not seek any cooperation with the forces of monopoly; he not only attacks their policies but their core philosophy, their definition of America. He is not afraid of them or of the people's ability to think rationally in spite of the media propaganda with which they were bombarded.
 
Things were much worse in 1936 than they are today(double digit unemployment, significant improvement from 1932, but still a low general standard of living). But labor and the masses of people were on the move, and the administration, rather than ignoring them or fighting, them had begun to identify with their struggles.
 
Roosevelt in 1936 had already achieved far more than Obama can hope to achieve by 2012, but this famous speech could help Obama  prepare for a campaign which would not only bring victory but a victory that would mean more than keeping the far right out of power--a victory that would enable him to really accomplish what those who elected him with the strongest majority for a Democrat in 40 years hoped that his administration would accomplish after the wreckage of the Bush years.
 
The second is if anything more important. It is Roosevelt's "new bill of rights" radio address from 1944, which the press called the "Economic Bill of Rights," and which the CIO and all left forces rallied around as ideological foundation for both reconversion to a peacetime economy and the creation of a society whose government would use all of its powers to guarantee the economic and social security of its citizens. Here also there is a warning about the dangers of rightwing reaction and a clear connection of that reaction with fascism.

Roosevelt is less angry in 1944  than hopeful of a postwar future for the American people based on security and abundance. He didn't live to try to implement that future. Harry Truman's reckless postwar confrontations with the Soviet Union, intervention in the Chinese Civil War, and other acts created a lasting Cold War where those whom Roosevelt had earlier denounced as "war profiteers" became the prime beneficiaries of the military industrial complex and the economic and both the enormous productive power, money capital, and what one might call moral capital that the U.S. emerged from WWII with were to squandered in the following decades.
 
Together, these two video clips should help us develop a 21st century perspective: