Joe Biden Wants An ‘FDR-Size Presidency.’ What Does That Even Mean?

Less than a month into the coronavirus pandemic, as the death count rose, businesses remained closed and Americans banged pots from their windows and on their front porches to celebrate frontline health care workers, Joe Biden mused in an interview with CNN about the scope of the problem facing the country.

“I think it may not dwarf, but eclipse, what FDR faced,” the then-presidential candidate told CNN on April 7, 2020, referencing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

One month later, New York Magazine ran a story on Biden’s expanding platform headlined: “Biden Is Planning an FDR-Size Presidency.”

The candidate referenced Roosevelt again in August. “I’m kind of in the position FDR was,” Biden told The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos.

In the campaign’s final week, Biden spoke in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt’s second home, where he recuperated from the polio that left him unable to walk, about his plan to “heal the nation.”

“FDR came looking for a cure, but it was the lessons he learned here that he used to lift a nation,” Biden said.

Biden now approaches his first 100 days in office ― a time to measure a first-term president’s success. These first 100 days are only marked because of the momentous nature of Roosevelt’s First 100 Days, which, as he said in a fireside radio chat upon their completion, “had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”

Biden set himself up to be compared to Roosevelt. The question now is whether he’s meeting the “FDR-sized moment.”

What Does It Mean To Have An ‘FDR-Sized Presidency?’

What set Roosevelt and the New Deal apart ― and what most contemporary politicians and political observers use to justify their own comparisons to his legacy ― is the scale of ambition.

One aspect is the amount of money to be spent, and Biden is certainly proposing significant figures. He already signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. He is now pushing a $2.3 trillion infrastructure and economic spending package while promising another $1 trillion legislative package covering tax changes and additional social spending. This is undeniably a huge sum of money to fund a sweeping program.

But the amount of money may matter less, in terms of comparison, than we think.

In his new book “Why the New Deal Matters,” historian Eric Rauchway explains that it wasn’t the dollar figure of the New Deal that made for an FDR-size presidency. It was the purpose of the programs and the meaning the American people took from them that mattered more.

That’s why other, more recent government interventions, “while immense in size, nevertheless fall short of the New Deal in terms of ambition,” Rauchway writes, referring to the inadequate bailouts and stimulus plans passed in response to the Great Recession.

“The metaphor of ‘bailout’ suggests the ship is sound; it has merely been swamped by a catastrophic swell and once the water has been expelled, it will again be seaworthy,” Rauchway writes. “Likewise ‘stimulus,’ which supposes the organism is healthy and merely needs a strong jolt of caffeine; or ‘pump-priming,’ which holds that the mechanism functions properly and the aquifer still yields plenty of water.” 

FDR did something different. “By contrast, New Dealers did not assume the United States was basically sound as it stood, but sought to strengthen its structure ― sometimes by substantially altering it,” he writes.