Now that Joe Biden is assured the Democratic nomination, lots of advisors will clamor to get his ear. As Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect warns, he should be careful about from whom he takes advice. If he cares about rebuilding America’s public schools, he should avoid anyone connected to Race to the Top, which was a hyper-version of George W. Bush’ failed No Child Left Behind. He should certainly avoid a Rahm Emanuel, not only because of his role in covering up the police murder of Laquan MacDonald, but because of his disastrous stewardship of Chicago’s public schools. It is rumored that Rahm wants to be Secretary of Education. Heaven forbid.
Biden: The 21st-Century FDR?
Joe Biden and his campaign are waging a determined campaign to demonstrate he knows that a page has been turned—that the restorative, incremental presidency he promised as a primary candidate is no longer capable of dealing with the crises the nation now encounters. I expect Biden will soon be quoting Lincoln’s annual message to Congress of 1862:
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.
As The Washington Post reports, however, the president who Biden now hopes to model himself on isn’t so much Lincoln as it is Franklin Roosevelt—specifically, the FDR who tilted public policy in favor of workers and a more and better managed capitalism.
But as my colleagues Bob Kuttner and Dave Dayen have pointed out, some of the eminences now advising Biden are architects of that “quiet past [which is completely] inadequate to the stormy present”—in particular, Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel. At the same time, Biden has set up policy committees that include left leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and is communicating somewhat regularly with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Which group will have the louder voice in a Biden administration will determine just how transformative—or ineffectually ancient-regime-esque—his presidency could be.
On this question, the history of Roosevelt’s presidency affords us some lessons. In FDR’s first year in office, one of his most important lieutenants was conservative Lewis Douglas, who made sure FDR’s budget was as close to balanced as possible, even as unemployment reached 25 percent of the workforce. Eventually, Douglas’s un-Keynesian counsels of austerity were overridden by liberal FDR lieutenant Harry Hopkins, who saw the need for and persuaded Roosevelt to establish a massive public-jobs program. Liberals like Hopkins, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and White House aide Tommy Corcoran held sway until 1937, when Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau persuaded FDR to balance the budget again—triggering a huge and swift rise in the unemployment rate that the administration had until then been steadily reducing, thereby ending the New Deal’s string of systemic reforms.
If Biden is serious about initiating the huge economic reforms and the economic recovery the country so manifestly needs, not to mention the reforms required to move us toward more actual, more lived racial equality, he’ll need to rely on advisers who aren’t the 21st-century versions of Douglas and Morgenthau—who aren’t, in short, Summers and Emanuel. He shouldn’t take my word for it; he should ask what would Roosevelt and Lincoln do?
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
AGREE with Meyerson!
So sick of the Neo-Liberals in the DNC.
and so sick of the Neo-Liberals pretending that they cannot fathom what the word neoliberal means
This has the potential of being Biden’s Achilles heel should he be elected. It will give the next Republican candidate a leg up. But, then again, if Biden doesn’t win, there won’t be another election.
And then there is education, now and in the immediate future.
I will vote for Joe Biden. But I am unimpressed with his plan for K-12 education. It is filled with jargon about achievement gaps, and rigor in courses, and job preparation and claims that zip codes should not determine opportunity—a clear signal that he has bought into the standard language of would-be reformers and that he has no fresh ideas.
His education task force has been expanded from 9 to 13. Nancy Bailey has some great background information on most of these members and observes that there is a noticeable absence of teacher voices except as represented by unions, and no respected critics of the move to privatize K-12 education though charter schools, vouchers, and eliminating elected school boards. Here are the current members of the Education task force, up from an original group of nine.
–Rep. Marcia Fudge. (D-OH) (co-chair of Task Force) House Committee on Education and Labor, member Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Progressive Caucus.
–Dr. Heather Gautney, Fordham University sociology professor; former education adviser to Sen. Sanders (co-chair of Task Force)
–Dr. Alejandro Adler. Professor at Columbia University, Focuses on student well-being (think SEL)
–Christina Vilsack. Librarian, literacy advocate, and former First Lady of Iowa. see more at Wikipedia
–Dr. Hirokazu Yoshikawa. Professor at New York University. Studies policies on immigration, early childhood, and poverty reduction.
–Eric Holder. Obama’s Former Attorney General. Chair, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
–Lily Eskelsen Garcia. President, National Education Association.
–Maggie Thompson. Former executive director of Generation Progress. Issues include immigration, student debt.
–Randi Weingarten. President, American Federation of Teachers.
–Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Issues include heath care and civil rights
–Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), Chair, House Committee on Education and Labor
–Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA). Co-author of The Dream Act,” I fought to include evidence-based education technology provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act.”
–Vanita Gupta, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Obama’s Acting Assistant Attorney General and Head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division ( see also Eric Holder)
https://joebiden.com/education/ https://joebiden.com/education/
The committee is full of policy wonks, but there is no representation of actual practitioners except for the two union people. I know that AOC has expressed support for public schools, but beyond her I have no idea where the other members of the committee stand on the issue of privatization. At least Emanuel has not been included, and that is a good sign.
This looks like a return to the Obama era of education policy. I’m surprised Peter Cunningham isn’t on the list. Forgive my skepticism.
I love the title of Diane’s post!
But no, Joe Biden does NOT want to be anything like FDR. However, I have to support him, we must excise this cancer mass out of the Oval Office!
“no respected critics of the move to privatize K-12 education though charter schools…”
Is that true? Because Bernie Sanders’ education advisor is the co-chair and if she isn’t a critic of privatization, that suggests that Sanders was just giving lip service to the issue. But I don’t think he was.
Dr. Heather Gautney is supposed to be excellent on the issues and having a co-chair with a strong perspective is – to me – much preferable than naming a teacher to the task force.
It is like naming Diane Ravitch to the task force.
I have no idea what will come out of this task force, but with two very strong pro-public education voices — AOC is also on it – I am certainly going to wait before I decide it is just Obama 2.0.
I can vouch for Heather Gautney.
What are AOC’s education credentials?
Here’s a very good argument for dumping Emanuel at this racially charged time.https://prospect.org/politics/rahm-emanuel-the-worst-man-for-the-moment/
Yes! Even if Emanuel did actually have Biden’s ear (which I still believe is arguable), at this moment his history should make him someone who Biden would go out of his way to distance himself from.
I love how the writer characterizes what is happening:
“one figure has been blabbing loudly about sidling up to the former vice president…”
People who are that close to power don’t usually have to keep “bloviating” about how close to power they are. That would be clear. In this case, we only suspect Emanuel is close to Biden because Emanuel has been pushing that idea himself, but is there any other evidence of it?
My hunch is that Rahm is bluffing to seem more important than he is.
Absolutely right!
Rahm Emanuel went to Sarah Lawrence College. He had the advantage of an individualized college education that is the antithesis of the No Chile Left Behind / Race to the Top world of high stakes testing that K-12 education has become. Didn’t he send his children to the private University of Chicago Lab School? Hopefully, if Biden gets elected he will choose someone that has been more of a consumer of public education.