THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY BLOG

 A President in Search of Greatness

President Biden would like to channel FDR. 

 

President Biden’s down-home, “average Joe” political personality certainly seemed to preclude a presidency in search of greatness. Unlike President Obama, Biden had never publicly voiced the aspiration to be a great president.

Moreover, Biden himself, during his long and traditional Senate political career, had always found a comfortable political home squarely within whatever the mainstream of the Democratic Party was at the time. A review of his Senate record concluded: “Many of Biden’s positions were well within the mainstream of the Democratic Party at the time he took them.” He was not a policy innovator, and most certainly was not a policy disrupter. 

Given his age and the mainstream nature of his long institutional experience, some expected Mr. Biden to preside over a “caretaker presidency.” Indeed, during the campaign, Biden called himself “a transitional candidate whose job it is to bring the Mayor Petes of the world into his administration.” There had even been talk that Mr. Biden had in mind a one-term presidency.

Yet, according to another view, while campaigning from his Delaware basement, Biden “underwent a metamorphosis. He entered it a cautious pragmatist, yearning for a reversion to the time before Donald Trump; he left convinced of his chance to become a latter-day Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

Perhaps. His first actions as president have been consistent with that possibility. The New York Times informs us that President Biden wanted to model the first days of his presidency on FDR’s first one hundred. 

More specifically,

“In the weeks before taking office, President Biden and his aides spent time digging into books about Franklin D. Roosevelt… exploring his iconic first 100 days, on the theory that no president since then has taken office with the country in a crisis quite so grave.”

So, 

“They devised their own opening-days blitz by essentially compressing 100 days into 10. Mr. Biden has now signed about 45 executive orders… initiating major policy shifts on a wide array of issues, including the coronavirus pandemic, racial justice, immigration, climate change and transgender rights.”

While seemingly diverse, all these initiatives are united by their intent to reverse many previous administration policies, as expected. They are also united by all being “of concern to different liberal interest groups that are part of his coalition.” Both of these purposes are squarely within the legitimate purview of a new, or really any, presidential administration. Their core problem, however, is that they are all geared to President Biden’s progressive base. As a result, they are not really responsive and are likely to be antithetical to the country’s real, most basic problem—our deep cultural and political divisions.

The president and administration have said “unity” was their most important presidential purpose. However, they have also claimed that the country faces four other major crises: the COVID pandemic, rebuilding the economy, a worldwide climate crisis, and a systemic national racism crisis.

If President Biden truly believes in the existential nature of these crises, they would provide a rationale for the unusual surge in his post-election ambition levels. It is possible that Mr. Biden’s Roosevelt-level ambitions were always there and were hiding in plain sight. Perhaps. Yet, if that were the case, they seem to have been extremely well hidden, even to Biden. There was little hint of this in his two previous presidential candidacies or his most recent one. 

Clinton advisor Rahm Emmanuel was famously quoted as suggesting it was never a good political idea to let a crisis go to waste, and “what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

President Biden, in his own stated view, now has four existential crises to address. That may be more than enough for him to begin thinking of himself in FDR terms. The president has substantial resources of support to address these issues, whether they truly are depression -level national or world catastrophes or not.

His presidency is now supported by a House Democratic majority, party power parity in the Senate, and the support of the Democratic Party's establishment and its allies across the country’s cultural, political, and civic institutions. It is also supported by portions of the Republican Party establishment and its traditional business allies. It has gained further support from Americans of all political views fatigued by the Trump presidency, its catastrophic leadership failure at the January 6 Washington March and thereafter as the riot took place, and its low marks for dealing with the COVID pandemic. In all these political circumstances, there are opportunities that allow President Biden not to let these crises, whatever their real levels, go to waste. 

The siren call of presidential greatness is mostly thought of as occurring before a candidate runs for that office. However, the Biden Presidency suggests that need not necessarily be the case. Circumstances and living in a residence where greatness stares down upon you from iconic paintings is enough to give any president ideas, big ideas.

The crucial element is whether they are the right big ideas. President Biden is clearly trying to channel FDR. However, it is more responsive to the country’s real crises to say that we need a Lincoln.