Biden Has Been the Best President Since FDR
On both domestic and foreign policy, as well as commitment to building a strong Democratic majority in Congress, he outclasses his predecessors
With Joseph Biden stepping down from the nomination, it is worth highlighting what an amazing Presidency he has had - unquestionably the best President since FDR and without the ugly racist underside of the New Deal. I was a harsh critic of Biden in the 2020 primaries, but his astounding success as President and dedication to promoting social justice has been nothing less than the most pleasant surprise of my lifetime.
Biden’s Economic Recovery Triumph
Start with the most basic economic successes. Dealing with the Covid recession, he implemented the most dramatic recovery program in U.S. history. The monthly job creation under his Presidency has dwarfed every other modern President - and has continued long after any initial expected spring back from Covid.
To emphasize the success of Biden’s recovery program, you can compare it to Europe where most of the Eurozone has barely recovered from Covid losses, while, by the end of 2023, the U.S. had seen significant inflation-adjusted GDP growth beyond what had existed before Covid. That reflects how much better Biden’s recovery policies were in the United States compared to the rest of the developed world.
But it’s not just the job and GDP recovery. It’s that this recovery was different in targeting help to low-income and working families. Despite worries over inflation, wage growth overall has outpaced inflation, and the additional financial help provided to families by Biden’s recovery policies has meant average and lower-income families have seen a sharp rise in net family wealth, with far greater percentage gains than for wealthier Americans. This is in sharp contrast to after the financial crisis when working families saw their family finances devastated for years by losses due to the Great Recession.
Biden has Restored the Role of Government in Economic Planning
What’s notable is that, despite Republican filibusters and opposition by moderates like Joe Manchin, Biden’s signature pieces of legislation from his Economic Recovery Act to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill to the Inflation Reduction Act to the CHIPS and Science Act, have revived the argument that government action is critical to a healthy economy.
It became a national joke that every week was “Infrastructure Week” under Trump with no tangible changes in the policies that had underinvested in our core infrastructure for decades. When Biden got his law passed, it funneled $1.2 trillion to transportation, power grids, broadband, and water systems to rebuild the building blocks of healthy communities across the nation.
The combination of those policies has meant the first major restoration of manufacturing jobs after decades of decline. Since the 1970s, every President has seen losses in manufacturing jobs during their Presidency (aside from a very small gain under Clinton), while Biden saw a massive surge in manufacturing jobs during his Presidency. Manufacturing jobs aren’t the only jobs that matter but as supply chain shortages showed during the pandemic, keeping a core of manufacturing jobs within our communities matters to their long-term health given the vagaries of the global economic system.
And if we care about fighting climate change, we need massive investments in converting our fossil-fuel-driven infrastructure to a clean energy one. The politics of a green transition requires that people believe that this will not be a threat to their own jobs but will promise new jobs in their community. This was the underlying idea of the Green New Deal and Biden has implemented this by promoting a wide geographic spread in new green investments in states across the country. Just see this map of new investments in battery-based jobs across the country.
Biden as Hero of Labor and Working Families
Biden has often billed himself as “Scranton Joe,” the son of working people and a person committed to expanding not just the wages of workers but their voice and power within the workplace. He became the first modern President to walk a picket line when he joined the United Auto Workers during their strike, but he has regularly called for supporting workers’ rights from his primary campaign onwards, including regularly calling to expand the right to form unions. '
Past Democratic Presidents would talk about unions when addressing union audiences, but Biden regularly talked about unions in major speeches to all audiences- a marked change that labor leaders have noted. This is one reason they have praised him as the greatest champion for labor rights who had been in the White House.
But Biden’s labor commitment was more than rhetorical. While Biden couldn’t overcome the filibuster to pass the PROACT, he has passed a major set of regulations to support unions and workers rights in general, including:
Guaranteeing overtime to any worker making less than $55,000 per year, ending the practice of employers forcing low-wage salaried workers to work at all hours with no extra pay.
Raising wages for construction workers under the Davis-Bacon Act for the first time in four decades- critical as more workers get hired in infrastructure jobs across the nation.
Creating new “joint employer” rules to extend union and other rights to workers at franchises and subcontractors when big companies try to pretend they have nothing to do with the low wages at their own branded companies.
Issued regulations to speed up union elections and end the endless delays used by employers to frustrate workers trying to organize unions.
His Federal Trade Commission has issued rules to ban “noncompete” contracts that prevent employees from switching jobs to rival firms, an innovative use of antitrust law to protect workers.
Critically, he fought to expand budget resources for the NLRB to enforce labor rights, since better regulations are meaningless without regulators on the job to enforce them.
Combined with a full employment economy that has given workers the confidence to stand up for their rights, we are seeing a new wave of union organizing like none seen in generations.
Standing up for Civil Rights
While filibusters and MAGA judges have rolled back civil rights repeatedly, the Biden administration has kept pushing forward on advancing civil rights in multiple areas.
In May 2022, Biden signed a police accountability executive order for federal agencies that bans chokeholds; restricts no-knock warrants, mandates the use of body-worn cameras and implements stronger use of force policies.
In 2022, President Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law, a landmark piece of legislation that codified federal protections for same-sex and interracial marriages. His administration issued new rules protecting LGBTQ+ youth from discrimination in schools, protected them in the foster care system, and protecting LGBTQ+ patients from discrimination in health care.
And a clear reality is that personnel is policy. Of 190 confirmed judges as of March 2034, 122 are women, 58 are Black, 35 Latino/Latina, and 33 Asian American and Pacific Islander. More than a dozen practiced civil rights law and 37 were public defenders, as well as eight being labor attorneys. Across his administration, Biden appointed a record 200+ LGBTQ+ people.
A Surprisingly Progressive Foreign Policy
By the time of his 2020 November election, I had become convinced his domestic policy would be pretty good, but I still expected to hate a lot of his foreign policy. But Biden ended up being a pathbreaker in building a unified progressive international policy that combined a pro-labor, pro-environment trade policy with commitments to international law and facing off the emerging rightwing nationalist bloc of leaders emerging worldwide.
Biden has never gotten enough credit for ending the war in Afghanistan - a decision that cost him politically but was necessary to end that two decade fruitless war. And as I wrote recently, Biden’s policy on Gaza has not only saved lives and stopped ethnic cleansing there, but helped energize the demands for Palestinian statehood. Like his defense of Ukraine, he has articulated a strong vision of an international order that protects people from the oppression of occupying states. His promotion of international cooperation on Ukraine matches his support for international efforts to fight climate change and, as I noted in first writing about his vision on Ukraine, it reflects his approach to restraining the global power of corporations:
The response to Russia is focused not on punishing the Russian people but on punishing the oligarchs who undergird his rule. Biden is building a trade policy, as I outlined in this Nation article, that is moving beyond the failed corporate trade deals of the past to focus on cross-border cooperation to strengthen union power in places like Mexico as the route to also raising wages here at home.
As Biden builds global cooperation to support Ukraine, there has been little commentary that this follows Biden negotiating his global deal with 130 countries to establish a minimum corporate tax, a dry run in building the collective agreements on corporate accountability now being deployed against those Russian oligarchs.
It’s not a small thing that when the Right in Guatemala was seeking to promote a coup against the 2003 election there - with the backing of Trump hacks - Biden’s administration worked tirelessly to ensure a new progressive President could take office. This is a massive break with the history of the U.S. supporting military dictatorships in that country and followed Biden supporting Lula’s election in Brazil against the Trumpist Bolsonaro. Biden ended up working globally as well as domestically against the emerging racist nationalist front that is allied with Trump. Where the U.S. was often the leader of a global network of authoritarians in the developing world, Biden has championed democracies worldwide.
Why Biden Outclasses Every Other President Since FDR
On foreign policy, the Biden improvement on his predecessors is most obvious. Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were Cold Warriors who in the name of fighting the Soviets allowed dictators of every stripe to flourish around the world if they would oppose Communists locally. The Vietnam War was the culmination of this policy as American forces literally destroyed villages in the name of saving them- with the US war killing an estimated million Vietnamese.
But that was just the headline atrocity. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress would train a generation of military thugs and coup leaders who would, with Johnson’s support as President, overthrow governments from Brazil to Indonesia. In the latter country, the US would back the new Suharto military regime beginning in 1965, which with US support killed an estimated 500,000 accused Communists and other opponents of the regime.
Jimmy Carter was a huge shift in policy on human rights but while he criticized many dictators, he continued to support many like the Shah of Iran - who had been installed in office back in 1953 by a CIA-backed coup- a legacy of authoritarianism that would cost the US dearly in Iran and other parts of the world.
On the global front, Clinton was largely allied with the corporate free trade agenda - what some called the Washington Consensus- which promoted crushing debt for developing nations, increasing global deregulation of corporate power, and bad trade deals like NAFTA locally and the World Trade Organization, both of which lacked enforceable environmental and labor components. Obama largely continued that legacy in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership and while his administration did better on promoting democracy in developing nations, in events like the Honduras coup in 2009, Obama was notably slow in calling out the suppression of democratic rights there and ultimately signed off on supporting the regime there.
And on economic policy, Biden is still a massive improvement on his predecessors.
Truman mostly oversaw the GOP Congress’s dismantling of the last vestiges of New Deal spending programs aside from Social Security and couldn’t even sustain his veto of the crushingly anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act - which later-to-be President Lyndon Johnson voted for, as he would vote with John Kennedy for the anti-labor Landrum Griffin Act in 1958.
Neither Johnson or Kenney would do much to promote better labor laws while in office, despite significant Democratic majorities. Kennedy passed few major policies, aside from a large tax cut that slashed taxes for the wealthy. Johnson obviously gets large credit for passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, as well as Great Society programs like Medicare and Medicaid, but at the time, the actual dollars allocated were surprisingly small and it would take significant action to expand spending on them under future Presidents.
Carter promoted a number of great policies, from environmental laws to student aid, but undermined much of it by signing of on big personal and corporate tax cuts in 1978 and then appointing Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve, who would impose blinding financial austerity on the nation which drove the country into recession - and helped elect Reagan to office.
To his credit, Bill Clinton would reverse some of this damage by raising taxes on the wealthy in his first term, but would ultimately help further the continuing deunionization of the US economy with his trade and overall regulation policies.
Obama was a vast improvement on Clinton with his own substantial if, as discussed above, ultimately inadequate recovery program. Obamacare was the signal success of his Presidency but his overall program was ultimately too limited and paled in comparison to the robust economic recovery and job investment programs created under Biden.
Biden’s Commitment to Progressive Democratic Power and the Good of the Nation
One other key difference between Biden and his predecessors is that Biden ended up being far more dedicated to supporting the success of the overall progressive Democratic majority. Most Presidents from Carter to Clinton to Obama ran the White House largely as one-man bands with their own tight circle of supporters and allies, often at loggerheads with the rest of the party. Clinton was extreme in adopting his stated “triangulation” policy in 1996 to help his own reelection by distancing himself from the rest of the party, but other Presidents adopted aspects of that.
Biden was different and built an administration deliberately reaching out to all parts of the party. Labor was fully welcomed in with major staff positions beyond the Labor Dept, notably in trade, while Lina Khan reached the antitrust crew, econ appointments brought in econ left, civil rights and other appointees to civil rights folks and so on. There's a reason so many leaders from AOC/Bernie to moderate Dems endorsed Biden so early and primary opposition could get no traction, despite worries about his age. Biden was more dedicated to supporting Democrats as a whole than any modern President— and the results were dramatic.
In Johnson’s 1966 midterms, Dems lost 47 House seats and 3 Senate seats
In Carter’s 1978 midterms, Dems lost 15 House seats and 3 Senate seats
In Clinton’s 1994 midterms, Dems lost 54 House seats and 8 Senate seats
In Obama’s 2010 midterms, - Dems lost a record 65 House seats and
7 Senate seats
Passing some good policies and then handing power to a Republican Congress for much of the next decade as happened under Carter, Clinton, and Obama limits how much success you can attribute to them.
Compare this to 2022 when the Dems lost only 9 House seats and actually gained a Senate seat- a dramatic success for Biden that leaves Dems with a real possibility - even if slim - of restoring united Democratic control this fall.
And yes, Biden agreeing to step down as nominee in the name of defeating Trump - despite all evidence he doubts the wisdom of other party leaders on the issue - shows his commitment to supporting the progressive party majority as a whole in ways that show a remarkable commitment to progressive success over his own ego.
No one in American history has won every party primary, had pledged control of almost all delegates at the convention - and then walked away from the nomination in the name of the common good of the party and the nation.
On that alone, Biden will be listed as one of the greats of Democratic Presidents in rankings in the future.
Note: Apologies for the roughness in spots of this summary, since it was thrown together in the wake of Biden’s announcement.