QUERETARO, Mexico -- Presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is often compared with South American leftists, has found a model in an icon from the north: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Lopez Obrador's economics team has developed a blueprint for what they call the "Mexican New Deal." Their modern version of Depression-era populism is an ambitious program to create millions of jobs and stem migration by undertaking huge public works projects, including a railroad network, vast housing developments, ports and timber replanting.

"Roosevelt didn't solve all of America's problems, but he gave American society a sense that they were on the right track," Manuel Camacho Sol?s, one of Lopez Obrador's top advisers, said in an interview. "Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador can represent something like that for Mexico."

Everyone south of the US in this hemisphere is getting more and more progressive while we retreat into the Dark Ages. If only we had our own FDR.