BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: America Voted for a Rest, Not a Revolution. Elected as Not Trump, Biden aspires to be the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Joe Biden aspires to be the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, so short of his showing up to work in a wheelchair and sucking on a cigarette holder, the first hundred days, which he marks this week, will serve as the most symbolic reminder of the president’s sense of historic purpose.
The ritual observation of the passage of FDR’s calendrical contrivance promises to be even more turgid than usual this year. President Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress, which he delivers on Wednesday, will come with special solemnity. We will be reminded that delivering the nation from the baleful legacy of a one-term Republican in the midst of a national crisis with an urgent flurry of executive and legislative initiatives is what Democrats do.
We can leave to future historians whether the creation of the White House Gender Policy Council will prove as consequential as that of the Tennessee Valley Authority. To be fair, different times pose different challenges. Eleanor at least would surely approve. Perhaps she’s having fireside chats with Dr. Jill the way she used to with Hillary Clinton.
FDR had a famously complaisant press covering him, but even he might have blanched at the deference shown by Mr. Biden’s media guardians. Newspapers did eventually rouse themselves to object that the 1937 effort to pack the Supreme Court might be constitutionally problematic. Today’s friendly stenographers don’t see the problem at all, and faithfully convey the White House line that the same idea is a much-needed “reform.”
To be fair, given the expected number of Obama era retreads in his cabinet, Biden voters were much more informed of what to expect from Joe Biden than FDR’s voters were in 1932:
It might sound odd coming from a libertarian, but I wish the Pelosi-Reid Democrats had more in common with Franklin Roosevelt. Not the Franklin Roosevelt who occupied the White House from 1933 to 1945, but the Franklin Roosevelt who aspired to the White House in the election of 1932. The Democratic platform of that year is a remarkable document, considering the way the party’s candidate went on to govern. It isn’t a libertarian manifesto—it endorses several subsidies and regulations—but it hardly embraces the enormous expansion in federal power that FDR would achieve. The very first plank calls for “an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than twenty-five per cent in the cost of the Federal Government.” (It also asks “the states to make a zealous effort to achieve a proportionate result.”) Subsequent planks demand a balanced budget, a low tariff, the repeal of Prohibition, “a sound currency to be preserved at all hazards,” “no interference in the internal affairs of other nations,” and “the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise except where necessary to develop public works and natural resources in the common interest.” The document concludes with a quote from Andrew Jackson: “equal rights to all; special privilege to none.” It sounds more like Ron Paul than Pelosi.
—“The New Franklin Roosevelts: Don’t count on a candidate’s campaign stances to tell you how he’ll behave in office,” Jesse Walker, Reason.com, April 10, 2008.
But between the New Deal and the Moral Equivalent of War from which it sprang from (including all of the Wilson administration retreads in Roosevelt’s administration), voters know that every Democrat president sees himself as spearheading the next Roosevelt administration. At a minimum, their operatives with bylines sure do:
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