Politics & Power Quote by Richard M. Daley

Nostalgia is doing double duty here: it flatters an older Democratic identity while indicting the party’s present as unrecognizable. Daley invokes Roosevelt not as a history lesson but as a brand name that once meant something concrete - wages, jobs, neighborhood stability, a government that showed up in ordinary people’s lives. The phrasing, “made a difference on them,” is clunky, but the intent is crisp: politics used to feel tactile. You could trace policy to rent money, to a doctor visit, to whether your dad got laid off.

The subtext is a lament about the collapse of the New Deal coalition, especially the urban, working-class base that powered machine-city Democrats like Daley’s Chicago. “They believed in that” signals something deeper than approval ratings: a kind of civic faith that the party’s promises were legible and reliably delivered. That’s also self-defense. Daley is implicitly arguing that the old style of Democratic governance - transactional, union-aligned, infrastructure-and-services heavy - wasn’t just corruption-with-better-PR; it was a social contract.

“But today it is completely different” lands as a deliberately vague accusation, and that vagueness matters. It leaves room to blame national Democrats for drifting toward professional-class priorities, cultural signaling, or technocratic fixes that don’t read as “quality of life” in the way a paycheck does. The rhetorical move is less about Roosevelt than about credibility: when material gains stop feeling guaranteed, loyalty turns into skepticism, and skepticism turns into political realignment.