[Abigail Spanberger is wrong: Biden campaigned explicitly by
comparing his ideas to the New Deal. That’s what millions of people
voted for.] [[link removed]]

ACTUALLY, JOE BIDEN WAS ELECTED TO BE FDR  
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Michael Tomasky
November 8, 2021
The New Republic
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_ Abigail Spanberger is wrong: Biden campaigned explicitly by
comparing his ideas to the New Deal. That’s what millions of people
voted for. _

Joe Biden , by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

 

The Democrats aren’t very good
[[link removed]] at
storytelling—not even, apparently, to some of their own members.
There’s a compelling story behind the party’s two infrastructure
bills that President Biden does a decent job of conveying
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but congressional Democrats do pretty horribly, with a few
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So I’ll tell it.

Let’s start with Virginia Congresswoman Abigail
Spanberger’s remark
[[link removed]] last
week about the president: “Nobody elected him to be FDR, they
elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

We coastal types who live in deep-blue America should give more
thought to the political and cultural pressures faced by Democrats
from districts like Spanberger’s, which takes in some Richmond
suburbs but is mostly rural, smack in the middle of the state. People
who live in New York or Washington, D.C., ought to drive through that
district and make note of all the MAGA signs and gun shops and
Confederate flags painted on the sides of buildings. It is not an easy
place to be a Democrat. And while I don’t know the gubernatorial
results from the 7th congressional district last Tuesday—because
the ballots are processed by county, not congressional district—I
bet they’re pretty bleak.

Spanberger won the seat in the 2018 Democratic wave election by about
1.8 percent, and she was reelected in 2020 by almost exactly the same
margin. With their razor-thin margin in the House, Democrats
desperately need Spanberger to win in 2022. If she and people like her
lose, Democrats are the minority for maybe the rest of the decade.
That guarantees that Congress passes nothing but tax cuts and
crazy-ass wedge-issue culture-war bills, and that helps nobody.

Now, when she says that people didn’t elect Biden to be FDR, for all
I know, she is correct with respect to the consensus view among people
she talks to in her district. I doubt that district is teeming with
New Deal fanatics.   

But where I live, in Jamie Raskin’s district in suburban Maryland,
everyone I know who voted for Biden did so precisely because they
wanted him to be FDR! And it’s not like this was some left-wing
secret that we conspiratorially hid preelection to spring on an
unsuspecting public. No—during the campaign, Biden _talked all the
time_ about FDR and the New Deal.

In 2019, he was the candidate of restoration. But after the pandemic
hit, he became the candidate of seizing this moment of crisis to give
Americans what virtually every other advanced democracy has already
given their people: expanded health care as a right, paid family
leave, subsidized childcare, better public transit, and so on.

I wrote a long piece about this for _The New York Review of Books_
[[link removed]]_ _last
July, in which I quoted Biden as saying to Chris Cuomo on April 7:
“I think it may not dwarf, but eclipse what FDR faced.… We have
an opportunity, Chris, to do so many things now to change some of the
structural things that are wrong, some of the structural things we
couldn’t get anybody’s attention on.” Biden was very explicit
throughout the general-election campaign about wanting to change the
“economic paradigm,” so I can only presume that a big chunk of the
81 million people who voted for him were doing so because of these
promises, not in spite of them.

This brings us to the story Democrats need to tell. It’s the story
of how supply-side and “neoliberal” (a word I dislike on the
grounds that it’s confusing because it actually refers to
conservative policies, such as free-market absolutism, low taxes, low
regulation) economic hegemony over nearly the last 50 years has choked
off public investment and transferred literally trillions of dollars
of wealth from the middle class to the rich. A Rand study last year
[[link removed]] put the
number at nearly $50 trillion. Put another way, to use numbers people
can wrap their heads around: If, since the late 1970s, this country
had followed the economic policies of the prior 30 years and not
embraced (Milton) Friedmanism and Reaganomics and their successors,
and income had kept pace with growth, the median individual income in
2018 would have been not the $36,000 it actually was, but around
$57,000.

That’s the economic story of the United States over the last four
decades. There’s a number called the Gini coefficient, which
measures income inequality on a scale from 1 to 100. As in golf, lower
scores are better. America’s best-ever Gini score was around 35, in
1968. Today, it’s getting close to 50. For comparison, the
Scandinavian countries are always best, in the low to mid-20s, and
South Africa is always worst, around 63. We’re much closer to the
most unequal societies than the least.

There’s obviously a lot more I could say here, for example about
labor’s declining share of national income (vis à vis capital) over
this period, or the way relentless tax-cutting at the state level has
harmed our public universities and contributed to these insane tuition
spikes, or so much else. But the bottom line is that if you see the
world through this kind of economic lens, you realize that even when
the economy today is “good,” it’s not really good in the way it
was in the postwar era, when the fruits of economic growth were far
more equitably distributed (within, of course, the racial and gender
limits of the time, which are also things that today’s Democrats
need to correct for in a big way). That’s what millions of us want.

Spanberger spent her career in the CIA, so I have no idea of the
extent to which she does or does not think about all this stuff. But
if she doesn’t, I wish she would. And further, if she doesn’t,
that’s on Nancy Pelosi to some extent. Pelosi ought to be organizing
economic history seminars for her caucus with people like Cecilia
Rouse, Heather Boushey, and Jared Bernstein of the Council of Economic
Advisers, and outside experts like Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO and
Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, and a whole bunch of
people who can make sure that House Democrats know this history. She
may be doing that, but I have a feeling that if she were, I’d know
about it.

Democrats should not be happy with an economy like 2019’s. They
should want an economy that is reimagined to give fewer benefits to
the well-off and more to the middle class and poor. That’s good for
the people of Spanberger’s district, just as it is for the people of
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s. (Speaking of AOC, it was disappointing
to see the augmented Squad vote against the infrastructure bill
[[link removed]].
I get the political point, but on a vote this important, people should
vote on the merits. This was the biggest piece of public investment
legislation of its kind since literally the Eisenhower administration.
Those six Democrats put themselves on the record as being against
that. Kudos to Pramila Jayapal, though, for voting yes and getting the
vast majority of the Progressive Caucus to agree.)

Legislation is always disappointing. Every bill that ever passes is a
compromise that doesn’t go far enough. And there’s a lot more the
Biden administration has to do on the paradigm change front that has
nothing to do with legislating. I’m keen to see what Jonathan
Kanter, Biden’s nominee to run the Justice Department’s antitrust
division, does about monopoly power, which in some ways will be more
important than any legislation that gets through Congress.

But Democrats have to be committed to increased public investment on
behalf of working people—and to making the better-off pay for most
of it. And yes, Biden _was_ elected to be FDR, or at least as close
as he can come given the grim political realities he faces that
Roosevelt didn’t. If Build Back Better passes, in whatever form, and
then his Justice Department really takes on monopolies, he’ll have
earned the comparison—and the people of Spanberger’s district will
benefit.

_Michael Tomasky
[[link removed]] @mtomasky
[[link removed]] is the editor of The New Republic._

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