Biden is not FDR; he is familiar Joe with his own ambitions
WASHINGTON—A year and a half ago, New York magazine ran a prescient article under the headline “Biden is planning an FDR-size presidency.”
The author, Gabriel Debenedetti, wrote that Biden had won the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination “by relying on perceptions that he was an older, whiter, less world-historical (and less inspiring) Barack Obama — a steady hand more electable against a monstrous president than any of his competitors did.”
The writer continued: “The heart of his pitch, when he delivered it clearly, was status quo ante, back to normal, restore the soul of the nation. But in the space of just a few months, COVID-19 and the disastrous White House response appeared to have dramatically widened Biden’s pathway to the presidency, making the matter of moderation and electability seem, at least for the time being, almost moot.”
He went on: “They also changed his perception of what the country would need from a president in January 2021 — after not just four years of Trump but almost a full year of death and suffering. The pandemic is breaking the country much more deeply than the Great Recession did, Biden believes, and will require a much bigger response. No miraculous rebound is coming in the next six months.”
The author noted that “long before the pandemic,” Biden had “described a range of action he’d take on day one, from rejoining the Paris climate agreement to passing the Equality Act for LGBTQ protections, as top priorities. Already his recovery ambitions have grown to include plans that would flex the muscles of big government harder than any program recent history.”
In other words, the article was describing the intentions of a very experienced public official who after 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president was rolling up his sleeves and embarking on what he said would be “a hell of a lot bigger” and “whatever it takes” to restore normalcy to the nation after the Trump detour into amateurism in government.
The author also recalled that when Biden first occupied the vice presidency, he “oversaw the implementation of historic stimulus funding” under Obama, and noted he had told CNN: “The blinders have been taken off because of this COVID crisis,” adding later, “I think people are realizing, My Lord, look at what is possible, looking at the institutional changes we can make, without becoming a ‘socialist country’ or any of that malarkey.”
The Joe Biden as revealed in this penetrating interview is one I discovered for myself in the course of writing the first biography of him more than decade ago. I accompanied him often as he developed and deepened his relationship with his fellow Delawareans in his adopted state. His father, Joe Sr., had lost his job in coal-country Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his son was born, and had to move the family to take another job. Joe Jr. became a familiar figure in Delaware over the years, phoning constituents and identifying himself in frequent phone calls simply by saying, “This is Joe.”
Now as president, he continues to do so in Delaware as he speaks to a vastly broader constituency, while still relying on his folksy personal style that may not always be as persuasive as it has been in his home state. But after all those years as a public servant, Biden has had a long time to think about what he might attempt to achieve were he to be so positioned as he is today.
So he is reaching high, as he chooses to do with FDR as his model, attempting to replicate Roosevelt’s great accomplishment of pulling the country out of the Great Depression of a century ago.