Joe Biden tries on FDR’s and LBJ’s shoes for size

The new president’s American Rescue Act is landmark legislation, close in importance to FDR’s Social Security Act and LBJ’s Medicare Act, the great socialist achievements of the last century.

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President Joe Biden

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Passage of President Joe Biden’s remarkable $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, aka Covid Relief Act, is being widely and wildly celebrated — as it should be — as legislation of Rooseveltian status.

It is landmark legislation, close in importance to FDR’s Social Security Act and LBJ’s Medicare Act, the two great socialist achievements of the last century. BHO’s Affordable Care Act comes close, and if that morphs into single-payer national health insurance some day it will stand as an equal achievement.

Biden himself has noted, with some justification, “I’m kind of in the position FDR was.” He is referring to the fact that he faces a dire economic problem as well as an international health crisis, the equivalent of a world war.

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I don’t want to overplay this comparison in a presidency that is only a couple of months old. We haven’t even reached the Rooseveltian yardstick of “the first 100 days.” But there is one parallel that strikes me as very interesting.

Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for president in 1932 on a much more moderate platform than he would enact in the New Deal. But once in office, convinced of the scope of the problem, he borrowed liberally from the ideas of Norman Thomas, the candidate of the Socialist Party and successor to the sainted Eugene V. Debs. (Some would eventually say that Roosevelt used socialism to save capitalism — a goal not exactly on Biden’s agenda, with capitalism in no apparent danger.)

Biden, a middle-of-the-road middleweight, was not an impressive candidate in many respects, though almost from the start I pegged him as the eventual nominee and winner. He stopped short of nastily trashing the progressives personified by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but he left no doubt they were too far left for the country. He pressed hard on the idea of bipartisanship and working across the aisle, as he had done in the Senate with some of the worst racists in that chamber.

Biden’s four-decade history in the Senate was pockmarked with bad legislation and a terrible handling of the Anita Hill Supreme Court confirmation hearing. His tenure also was marked with excellent measures such as the Violence Against Women Act.

Further Biden was known as a gaffe machine. Most of those goofs were harmless, but some wandered into Biden-babble, suggesting this septuagenarian might be more seriously addled.

None of this mattered by Nov. 3, and he won the presidency by an amazing 7 million vote margin, flipping five states and gaining a Senate majority. After selecting a diverse, competent and mainly centrist cabinet, he reached far and wide, largely to progressives, including some who had run against him in the primaries — notably Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado — and fashioned his far-reaching pandemic rescue act.

Prime among the American Rescue Plan’s many facets is a long-term focus on eliminating poverty, notably child poverty; it will be halved by direct dollars and tax relief for families. Imagine: Alleviating poverty by direct payments of cash, much as socialists have been advocating since at least the mid-1960s with their Guaranteed Annual Income, which was also revived by Andrew Yang in the Democratic primaries.

Biden always talks about the middle class and few corporate Democrats say much about the poor. But he is now a president talking and acting seriously about the perennial socialist goal of ending poverty — and doing so with the tools of big government and a progressive economic agenda, no longer scared off by concerns about deficit spending.

Apart from dealing with the pandemic, the American Rescue plan provides significant economic relief for the working poor, the working class in general and small businesses. Biden has reached out and up from his comfortable center-left positions, though rarely calling his moves “progressive,” let alone socialist. He still talks about reaching across the aisle and is opposed to ending the filibuster.

But if Biden is able to make the American Rescue Plan work and come up with a few similar gestures, he may well deserve to try on one of FDR’s shoes for size.

Political consultant Don Rose writes a weekly column for the Observer, where this column first was posted.

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