It's Time to Recognize Biden as a Great President
And he has had to do it while "dancing backwards and in high heels"
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joe Biden and Lyndon B. Johnson (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)
{NOTE: A shorter and slightly different version of this essay first appeared in Salon.}
On this, the second birthday of the Biden Administration, an appraisal of his presidency thus far is in order.
Scientific polling did not yet exist in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first two years as president, but it is beyond question that his approval was enormous. During Lyndon Baines Johnson's first year-plus in office, his approval rating averaged an astonishing 74.2 percent. At the end of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.'s second year in office, his approval ratings hover in the mid-40s. It would seem laughable, then, to categorize him as being on their level. FDR is almost always counted among the greatest American presidents. LBJ is not, but likely would be had he not sunk the nation into a pointless, no-win war in Southeast Asia.
Yet a strong case can be made that JRB has, to this point, proven to be a great president, worthy of mention alongside those two.
As an historian who has devoted a couple of decades each to researching and writing on the eras in which the second President Roosevelt and the second President Johnson were in office, I am in a position to make that case. My book The Great Depression: America 1929-1941 remains among the standard histories of that era. The time frame of my new book, The Times They Were a-Changin’ – 1964: The Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn, is what I call “the Long 1964,” from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the fall of 1965—precisely Lyndon Johnson’s first two years as president.
Let’s begin with a few points of comparison between the three men and the situations when they entered the nation’s highest office.
Each of them had long seen the presidency as his destiny, but faced major challenges that could have derailed their quests—Roosevelt contracting polio in 1921, Johnson facing the seemingly impossible task of winning and staying in statewide office in the south in the 1940s and 50s while showing enough of his progressive core to have a chance of getting support from Democrats outside the region, and Biden’s loss of his wife and daughter in a 1972 car crash just after the had first been elected to the Senate and his son to brain cancer in 2015, when he was near the end of his two terms as vice president and seen as a leading contender for 2016.
Each of them was greatly underestimated when he entered the presidency. “Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader,” Walter Lippman famously wrote in early 1932. “…He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.” The elite intellectuals of the Kennedy Administration mocked Vice President Johnson as “Rufus Cornpone” and “freckle-belly.” Biden was—and in many quarters still is—seen as too unexciting, too old, and so on.
FDR was charismatic and a great speaker; LBJ and JRB—not so much.
Johnson and Biden both had long experience in dealing with Congress. FDR did not, but the gravity of the crisis when he was inaugurated meant he didn’t need much ability in that area and could easily go over the heads of Congress to the American people.
Both FDR and LBJ began their presidencies against the backdrop of national tragedies that gave the potential for strong support for their programs.
Roosevelt took office at the nadir of the Great Depression, with the nation’s banking system in collapse and roughly a quarter of the workforce unemployed. “The Nation asks for action, and action now,” he correctly assessed in his first inaugural address. “The whole country is with him. Even if what he does is wrong, they are with him, just as long as he does something,” humorist Will Rogers said. “If he burned down the Capitol, they would cheer and say, 'Well, at least he got a fire started, anyhow!’” Even rightwing businessmen were desperate; they didn’t organize to oppose him until he had somewhat stabilized the situation. The American Liberty League was launched only a year-and-a-half into Roosevelt’s presidency.
The pandemic served as something of a parallel to what the Depression was for Roosevelt, and the horrors of Trumpism and the January 6th Insurrection could have provided a propellant similar to the assassination for Biden, but Donald Trump’s cult leader control over a large fraction of the population got them to believe two huge lies: that Trump had done a good job handling the pandemic and that Biden had not really won the election.
The more notable accomplishments during Roosevelt's first 24 months include several important pieces of Depression-related legislation, such as the Emergency Banking Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act, as well as the creation of numerous new federal agencies, some of which are still with us — including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Housing Administration, the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation and the Tennessee Valley Authority — and others now part of history, like the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration and the Civil Works Administration. (Some of the New Deal legislation of the most lasting importance, such as the Social Security Act and the Wagner Labor Relations Act, came later, in the second half of FDR's first term.)
In his first two years in office, Lyndon Johnson oversaw the massive achievements of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the launching Medicare and Medicaid, as well as the Economic Opportunity Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Housing and Urban Development Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act, which eliminated national origin, race and ancestry as criteria for being allowed to immigrate into the United States. His administration also initiated Project Head Start and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.
Biden's two-year record stacks up well against the very high bars set by FDR and LBJ, beginning with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to stimulate the economy, followed by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to provide for repairs and extensions to the nation's roads, bridges, railroads, water systems (the need for which is obvious, for instance, in Jackson, Mississippi, where I teach) and broadband. In 2022, he secured passage of the PACT Act, expanding health care and benefits for those who were exposed to toxic substances during their military service, and the CHIPS and Science Act, funding advanced scientific research and investing $53 billion to manufacture silicone microchips in the U.S. The crown jewel in 2022 was the Inflation Reduction Act, which does more than any previous legislation to mitigate climate change, allows Medicare to negotiate with Big Pharma to cut prescription drug prices, begins to crack down on tax evasion by corporations and the very rich and much more. In December, the Respect for Marriage Act, protecting both intrasex and interracial marriage, was passed, as were a reform of the Electoral Count Act, making it more difficult to overturn an election, and reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
Biden has also excelled on the international stage far more than Roosevelt did in his first two years — and more than Johnson ever did. Biden rallied the forces of democracy to oppose Vladimir Putin's authoritarian aggression and aid Ukraine and revived NATO, which Trump had on the verge of collapse.
To grasp just how much harder it is to enact a progressive program in the 2020s than it was in the mid-1960s, consider this: In 1964, 77 percent of Americans—and, astonishingly, 74 percent of Republicans—polled said they believed that the federal government could be trusted all or most of the time. By 2019, only 17 percent of those polled trusted the federal government.
And then there is the enormous advantage that FDR and LBJ had over JRB in terms of the makeup of Congress. During his first two years as president, Franklin Roosevelt had large majorities—313-117-5 in House and 59-36-1 in the Senate. In LBJ’s first year in office, Democrats held a 258-176-1 in the House and 67-33 in the Senate, and in 1965, the Democratic majorities swelled to 295-140 and 68-32.
“We would sit around in the White House and ask each other, ‘What needs to be done?’” Dick Goodwin, then Special Assistant to the President, later told me as he recalled early 1965. “We should be able to pass anything we want to.”
Joe Biden has had a small House majority, averaging 222-211, and a 50-50 Senate with a Democratic Vice President making the slimiest possible majority.
Neither Roosevelt nor Johnson had to deal with the kind of stranglehold Fox “News” and other rightwing media have on the minds of millions of Americans. Neither of those earlier presidents faced the power of the leader of the other party who had nearly half the country ready to believe any lie he tells them.
In Olympic competitions, the "degree of difficulty" of a dive, gymnastic performance or ice-skating jump is factored into the score. If we do the same with Biden, anyone but an East German judge during a Cold War-era Olympics would award him a very high score. His first two years rival the accomplishments of both Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, the two most effective of 20th-century presidents.
The current President has had a first two years of accomplishment similar to those of FDR and LBJ and, was said about Ginger Rogers doing everything that Fred Astaire did, JRB has had to do it dancing “backwards and in high heels.”