Wherefore the historical ballot?

In my last post, I laid out how I would've voted in every U.S. Presidential election ever. Why? Well, mostly because it's occurred to me to think about that from time to time, and it's getting all election-season-y so I thought I'd post it. But I do have a point I'd like to make about the concept of a historical ballot. I think party platforms should include one. Or, I dunno, I guess it would sound weird to say something like, "This is the Democratic Party, and we wish Henry Clay had beaten our guy in 1844, because he was more anti-slavery." But I'd like to hear parties give their account of whether they are, in retrospect, glad that they lost certain elections, or wish they hadn't won one that they did.

For example, Republicans currently favor the continued existence of Social Security. Does that mean they're glad the guy who created that program, Franklin Roosevelt, won his elections? They also favor the continued existence, in one form or another, of Medicare, and they support the Civil Rights Act. (Well, most of them do, anyway.) So are they glad that the man behind the Civil Rights Act defeated conservative icon Barry Goldwater in 1964, and went on to create Medicare?

Particularly for a conservative/regressive party, I think these are tricky decisions to answer. If you want to stop the advance of policy in a particular direction where it is currently, but you don't want to reverse it at all, does that mean you're glad it got exactly this far? If you want to roll things back to where they were 20 years ago, does that mean you're happy things got as far as they were 20 years ago? If not, does that tell us that you'd really like to roll things even further back, but you just don't think it's politically feasible? It'd be nice to get the Republicans on record on whether they think FDR's accomplishments were a good thing, or whether they would rather Hoover and Landon and Willkie have had a series of mediocre Republican terms that probably would've included a pretty solid economic recovery but wouldn't have created a whole new innovative welfare state. Because right now they're saying that they're still in favor of the things FDR did continuing to not have been undone, but it's kind of hard to imagine Mitt Romney, or Paul Ryan, or Chris Christie or Marco Rubio or any of the others, pulling the lever for Roosevelt in 1936, had they actually been there.

A progressive party, by the way, that thinks public policy has been moving in a good direction on the whole over the last many decades and would like to keep it moving in that direction, has less trouble with this. We're glad that Democrats accomplished the things they did, we wish Republicans hadn't had so much opportunity to impede further progress, and we'd like to move things even further along than any of our previous Presidents have taken us. Since we have at no point conceded that the past was a decent model for the future, we don't have to answer questions about exactly which part of the past we're so nostalgic for.