On April 9, Amity Shlaes of Bloomberg News and the Council on Foreign Relations delivered the eighth of the 2006-2007 Bradley Lectures. Edited excerpts follow. The full text of the lecture is available through www.aei.org/event1379/.

In April 1935, the most significant presidential campaign of the past hundred years began. This campaign tipped the balance of American federalism and shaped all American politics henceforward by promising Americans that Washington was there to serve interest groups and pay them. The campaign was so groundbreaking that it even changed the American language. It altered one of our most important words: before 1936, "liberal" meant one thing. After 1936, it meant another. The new politics that Franklin Delano Roosevelt created seemed to be warranted at the time, but they also locked into place the entitlement trap that confines candidates--from Mitt Romney and John McCain to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton--in 2007 or 2008. If we are frustrated at politics now, it is because of 1936.

This story starts on April 7, 1932, during one of the lowest lows of the Great Depression. At that time, Herbert Hoover was still president, and he was leading a number of spending initiatives aimed at invigorating the economy. Federal outlays were only 5 percent of GDP. State and local government outlays were 10 percent, and it was to state and local governments that many looked for a means for recovery. Washington in those days was scared of big business. The suspicion that the progressives might take over seemed farfetched. The financial capital of New York threatened Washington. There was no big redistribution and no common presumption of a class society. American workers did not view themselves so much as a class in these years; they viewed themselves as moving up and down the economic ladder.

Into this context stepped Roosevelt, the candidate. One of his first big national speeches was on NBC's Lucky Strike Hour at 10 p.m. Then the governor of New York, Roosevelt talked about how bringing down tariffs could help the economy, and about how small banks needed help lending to homes and farms. Roosevelt also spoke of the plight of the average American--two in ten of whom were unemployed--and the former soldiers, the economic infantry of the nation. These men, Roosevelt said, deserved more attention. They were "the forgotten man" at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

The Forgotten "Forgotten Man"

The forgotten man was the idea of a speechwriter, Raymond Moley, a reformer at Columbia University whose specialty was criminal law. Moley, like so many of those around Roosevelt, was incandescent with excitement at the whole process. He was writing a speech for the presidential candidate from the state with the most electoral votes of all: forty-seven. Moley wrote to his sister about how he had come up with that phrase for Roosevelt. Roosevelt, Moley said, "was trying to reach the underdog. And I scraped from my memory an old phrase, ‘The Forgotten Man,' which has haunted me for years."

But it was not just an old phrase. It was the title of another speech, given many times in the 1880s, when Moley was a child. The author of that speech, Yale professor William Graham Sumner, had been a critic of Roosevelt's cousin Theodore. Sumner had studied abroad in Göttingen and watched as Bismarck built up a social welfare state in Germany. What he saw horrified him, and he feared it might be replicated in America. Sumner deplored the consequences of the progressive impulse. He wanted to sustain what people at that time called liberalism: a creed that stood for the anonymous individual, his freedom, his obligations, and his rights. Sumner wrote prophetically about the voter who was not included in an interest group, the forgotten man "who is never thought of. . . . He works, he votes, and he always pays."

Although Roosevelt first used the phrase in spring 1932, it is not clear he had thought about where it all would lead, or what he even meant at that moment by his forgotten man, beyond the fact that the forgotten man was poor or felt poor. As a new president, Roosevelt still did not make clear what he meant by the forgotten man. Starting again in his next campaign, he continued to reach out to the mythical figure of the forgotten man through the spring, summer, and fall of 1936. Many of his programs were generally aimed at helping the economy. But many programs were developed to target groups. Roosevelt saw what his group work did. It got votes. Near the elections, Roosevelt moved into a frenzy, reaching out to groups he neglected before.

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In the case of the Democratic Party in the 2008 election, you see the forgotten man in the contest between Obama and Clinton. The argument harkens back to Sumner and Roosevelt. What Americans like about Obama--as Sumner might have--is the fact that he does not belong to an interest group, the black group. What the Democratic Party, especially donors, conversely like about Hillary is that she is the interest group and will defend the interest group.