Douthat lies about Social Security

In trying to explain why the country's drift toward the left turned around in its tracks because of alleged "overreach" by Obama, he tells this whopper:
The central premise of the White House’s policy-making, the assumption that an economic crisis is a terrible thing to waste (as Rahm Emanuel famously put it), turned out to be a grave tactical mistake. It drew exactly the wrong lesson from earlier liberal eras, when the most enduring expansions of government — Social Security in the 1930s, Medicare in the 1960s — were achieved amid strong economic growth, rather than at the bottom of a recession.
Socia Security was achieved during strong economic growth?

Ahh, the latest slander against FDR and Keynesian economics.

That said, Douthat may be right that many 2008 Obama voters expected him, like FDR, to be an eclectic liberal of sorts.