President Joseph Biden spoke to the nation from the White House last Thursday night, his first such address since taking office. It is clear that he knows what sort of president he wants to be. It is not clear that it will work.
Biden’s model is Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
We know that the president has chosen to surround himself with many iconic images in the Oval Office. But, aptly, the biggest one, the one that looms over them all, is FDR.
Speaking from the East Room of the White House, the setting for the address was grand and formal and stand-up. (Biden wants us to know he is a stand-up guy who will tell us “the truth.”) But the tone was that of a fireside chat — our commander in chief talking to us as a fellow American citizen.
And Biden’s tone is winning — maybe exactly what we need right now. He is earnest, empathetic and — the surprise — humble. It is refreshing after Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama who, though they had nothing else in common, spoke from on high, with no conditionality and no self-doubt. Both might have come down from the mountaintop with “my” Ten Commandments.
Even if he is faking it, with his prosaic, somewhat bumbling speaking style, Biden comes off as a servant leader, not a demigod head of a “movement,” meant to change all things. He has no swagger, someone said. He actually thanked us for listening.
There are some advantages to age: One is that you take the long view and do not get rattled by daily setbacks. Another is that, having seen much of life, you know how many things can go wrong and do not confuse yourself with the deity.
But if the Biden tone is Dwight Eisenhower or Calvin Coolidge, the model for executive action is clearly FDR. Biden wants an activist presidency — one in which the president is the national father figure and the CEO of a vast labyrinthine organization that is going to fix things and solve problems.
Biden sees the coronavirus as a foreign enemy and himself as a war president.
This may not play, for at least a couple of reasons.
Yes, a pandemic would seem an obvious and right time for positive and activist government, just as depression and warfare are times for building engagement and unified purpose. Biden is right about that. And he has made real progress against the pandemic by mobilizing the federal government and knowing how to “do” government.
When he pleads that he needs our help and says Americans cannot fail if we act together, it is convincing, even inspiring.
But, unlike Roosevelt’s time, there is vast and deep national skepticism about the ability of the federal government to act with confidence and intended result, at least beyond and after crisis.
For example, after we beat COVID-19, would we trust the feds to run the entire national health insurance system?
And who among us really believes the government can turn the economy up or down or create jobs?
The lack of nuance about the nature of government in the Biden administration is troubling.
The passage of the Biden stimulus bill is a political victory that Presidents Obama or Bill Clinton would have relished. It is big and dramatic in that FDR way. And the help now on the way for the entertainment industry and state and local governments is necessary and overdue. But a partial bailout for the airlines? Is that good public policy?
Moreover, handouts to people who are neither poor nor out of work, and putting the tab for this on the next generation, is not progressive. It is irresponsible.
The president will need to find a more sophisticated and subtle way to recreate the New Deal. Throwing money at problems and infantilizing citizens won’t work. The last president who wanted to be FDR, Lyndon B. Johnson, tried the “go big” approach, and it failed.
We Americans came by our skepticism about big government honestly.
Democrats would do well to remember that FDR believed in work not welfare and that transfer payments are far more effective than new bureaucracies.
Biden needs to keep in mind that our political culture is profoundly different than 1932, or even 1942. We devour our presidents now. Nobody gets mandates and nobody gets a long time. Maybe nobody gets to be FDR, at least in the same way.
Presidents Clinton and Obama both essentially got two years to govern and six of regency. If President Biden wants to rebuild infrastructure next, he had better act soon and seek out Republican help, also soon.
