1964 was also the year of Lyndon's landslide, a time of great social upheaval and a mass shift to the left, brought on by Kennedy's death (Kennedy being a moderate Dem compared to Johnson). That was also shortly before the Supreme Court declared the OMOV fiat and made the state senate unconstitutional, allowing the urban liberals to overrun the legislatures. Of course, this was also true to a certain extent on the global scale (that's right around when Canada started their universal health care stuff). Had Johnson not screwed up so royally on Vietnam, we might have ended up even worse.
Compare us now to roughly halfway between then and now (say, 1988 or so) and the results will be far different. Heck, even go back to just 2005, the high water mark of modern conservatism. People responsible for Obama's rise to power have learned from this. They have taken every painstaking effort to manipulate the masses into doing the bidding they cannot. They learned from 1964. They learned from 1984, 1994, 2004.
There has been an undeniable and rapid shift to the left in the past eight years, brought on by a level of social engineering unheard of in modern history.