Biden Is Planning an FDR-Size Presidency
He thinks he’ll survive Tara Reade’s accusation. But he knows he can’t be an average-Joe Democrat anymore.
nymag.com
Really great article from NY Mag today. It blows apart the fear that Biden will try to play it safe and govern as a moderate. He is planning to go all out with a government plan on policy, more so than any predecessor in decades.
Then, sometimes looking at the small lake abutting his backyard that bulges out from Little Mill Creek, the self-conscious man in the Democratic middle — mocked by the activist left throughout the primary campaign as hopelessly retrograde — considers the present calamity and plots a presidency that, by awful necessity, he believes must be more ambitious than FDR's.
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. 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.
Widely seen as a cautious, tradition-bound pol and intuitive centrist within the Democratic fold, Biden stopped his economic advisers in their tracks one morning in late April.
Sure, massive gobs of federal financial help have already been approved — unlike in 2008, he pointed out — but that still won't be enough.