(C) Common Dreams
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Biden’s Campaign Needs a Dramatic Gesture. So Here’s a Thought. [1]

['Michael Tomasky', 'Walter Shapiro', 'Jason Linkins', 'Timothy Noah', 'Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani', 'Tori Otten']

Date: 2023-09-05

So, back to the dramatic gesture: What could Biden undertake that would stand a chance of providing an aggressive narrative framework for his campaign and maybe get people’s attention?

I take you back now to late 1943. Chester Bowles was a New Dealer and adviser to Franklin Roosevelt who was running the Office of Price Administration. By 1943, it was already clear that the Allies were likely to prevail in the war, and Bowles was thinking ahead to the transition to a peacetime economy, and about how to make sure that Americans’ standard of living would be better after the war than it had been before it. So around Thanksgiving of that year, while Roosevelt was preparing to head to Tehran for a Big Three summit, Bowles wrote the president a note suggesting that he give a speech that might go like this:

Therefore, I propose a second Bill of Rights in the field of economics: the right to a home of your own, the right of a farmer to piece of land, the right of the businessman to be free from monopoly competition, the right to a doctor when you’re sick, the right to a peaceful old age with adequate social security, a right to a decent education.

In his next State of the Union address, Roosevelt unveiled his proposal for an “Economic Bill of Rights.” It included eight bullet points covering the rights to work, food, clothing, and leisure; freedom from monopolies and unfair competition; additional rights to housing, education, medical care, and Social Security. Bowles had hoped that FDR would make this the centerpiece of his 1944 campaign. He did not. He ran mainly as a wartime president. He mentioned the matter only one more time, in a late-October speech in Chicago. But even those scant mentions committed the Democratic Party to a postwar program of economic Keynesianism.

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[1] Url: https://newrepublic.com/article/175361/bidens-middle-class-economics-2024

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