Writing in the Washington Post this Friday, Greg Sargent says that President Trump's "depraved incompetence" has forced Joe Biden to respond by "projecting his intention to function as an ambitious president in the [mold] of Franklin D. Roosevelt."
As the recovery slows and Congress fails to manifest an extension of supplemental unemployment insurance in the face of a potential eviction crisis, Trump’s claim that our rapid reopening had unleashed a “rocket ship” recovery has been proven false. Sargent says that the new Roosevelt Institute report has some good guidelines for Biden to capture FDR's spirit.
"To speak to the nation in an optimistic tone at a moment of profound uncertainty and fear, as FDR did, means reaffirming the idea that economic and distributive outcomes are the result of policy choices. That was meant to rebut the Hooverism of the day," Sargent writes. "But in the current context, it gives rise to the report’s other core idea — that our crises have exposed deeper systemic problems and injustices in our political economy, ones that predated the virus and are baked into our market rules, ones that we created and that we can change."
Sargent contends that if Biden wins the presidency, Republicans will try to make the recovery as crushingly slow and miserable as possible.
"Biden is often said to be temperamentally optimistic but ideologically incrementalist. If he really wants to project an FDR-style presidency, which appears sincere, one answer might be to locate the optimistic spirit that resides in ideological boldness," Sargent concludes.
Read the full op-ed over at The Washington Post.
