Whether Joe Biden was your first choice for the Democratic nomination or your last choice (or somewhere in between) there are many, many reasons to be excited about a Biden presidency.
In this series, I will list 100 reasons, 1 by 1, to be excited about a Joe Biden presidency.
Maybe you would like to be more excited about Joe. Maybe you want to learn more. Maybe you already love Joe (like me) and want to have facts to share with your friends about him. Whatever the reason, this series is designed to share information and excitement about our future president.
Reason #3 to be excited about Joe Biden: Biden Is Planning an FDR-Size Presidency
We often don’t get the most progressive, productive presidencies from the most progressive candidates. Instead, we get them from people who know how to get things done in the government and who are president at the right time. There is reason to think that a Biden presidency will bring us just that:
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.
Long before the pandemic, he described a range of actions he’d take on day one, from rejoining the Paris climate agreement to signing executive orders on ethics, and he cited other matters, like passing the Equality Act for LGBTQ protections, as top priorities. Already his recovery ambitions have grown to include plans that would flex the muscles of big government harder than any program in recent history.
That is impressive already! Now with the pandemic, what will he do?
Biden wants more spending. “A hell of a lot bigger,” he’s said, “whatever it takes.” He has argued that, even if you’re inclined to worry about the deficit, massive public investment is the only thing capable of growing the economy enough “so the deficit doesn’t eat you alive.” He has talked about funding immense green enterprises and larger backstop proposals from cities and states and sending more relief checks to families. He has urged immediate increases in virus and serology testing, proposing the implementation of a Pandemic Testing Board in the style of FDR’s War Production Board and has called for investments in an “Apollo-like moonshot” for a vaccine and treatment. And he floated both the creation of a 100,000-plus worker Public Health Jobs Corps and the doubling of the number of OSHA investigators to protect employees amid the pandemic. If he were president now, he said in March, he would demand paid emergency sick leave for anyone in need and mandate that no one would have to pay for coronavirus testing or treatment. As the crisis deepened, he said he would forgive federal student-loan debt — $10,000 per person, minimum — and add $200 a month to Social Security checks.
but, but…. isn’t Biden a centrist? From the old school?
No Biden is pragmatic and his goal is getting things done to help people — from the position in which he can do that. He learns and grows and shifts over time like a smart, empathic person
Biden is also a lifelong Democrat who likes the view from the center of the party, enough to move rapidly to accommodate when it shifts, as it is doing now very quickly. He may look like a milquetoast moderate to the activist left and maybe even to you, but the party — and world — has changed so fast that even his primary platform puts him well to the left of Obama in 2008 and, in many ways, left of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Those close to him say he sees in the crisis an obvious window for action. “There is no denying that the challenges a President Biden would face in 2021 are different than anyone could have imagined six months ago given the economic and health consequences of the coronavirus,” Feldman, who has worked with Biden for nearly a decade, told me. “What I’ve heard the vice-president say over and over again is this crisis is shining a bright, bright light on so many systemic problems in our country, and so many inequities. It is exacerbating and shining a light on environmental-justice issues, racial inequalities, so many other problems.”
so there we have it. Reason #3 to love Joe Biden — he is planning to bring us an FDR sized presidency right when we need it!
want to donate to help Biden win?
did you miss any of our 100 days? Here they are:
Day 1: Biden’s Tax Plan
Day 2: Gay Marriage
