"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"
About this Quote
Biden’s line is doing two jobs at once: flattering Roosevelt as a plainspoken truth-teller, and quietly scolding today’s political class for preferring melodrama to diagnosis. The phrasing is deliberately blue-collar - “Look, here’s what happened” - a mini fable about leadership as translation. In Biden’s telling, real authority isn’t moralizing about “princes of greed” (a wonderfully tabloid villain label) but walking the public through a crash with the steadiness of a foreman explaining a busted machine.
The kicker is the anachronism. Roosevelt didn’t “get on the television” in 1929; his famous medium was radio, especially the fireside chats. That slip matters less as a fact-check gotcha than as a window into Biden’s intent: he’s collapsing eras to make an argument about media, trust, and immediacy. “Television” functions as shorthand for mass reassurance - the leader entering your living room, meeting panic with narrative.
Subtext: populism, but with a technocratic spine. Biden wants the emotional permission to be angry at predation while insisting that anger alone is not governance. He’s carving out a contrast between performative outrage and explanatory competence, suggesting that citizens don’t just want someone to name enemies; they want someone to map cause and effect and then act.
Contextually, it’s a post-crisis memory play - an appeal to the New Deal as the gold standard for emergency legitimacy, and a reminder that credibility is built by showing your work.
The kicker is the anachronism. Roosevelt didn’t “get on the television” in 1929; his famous medium was radio, especially the fireside chats. That slip matters less as a fact-check gotcha than as a window into Biden’s intent: he’s collapsing eras to make an argument about media, trust, and immediacy. “Television” functions as shorthand for mass reassurance - the leader entering your living room, meeting panic with narrative.
Subtext: populism, but with a technocratic spine. Biden wants the emotional permission to be angry at predation while insisting that anger alone is not governance. He’s carving out a contrast between performative outrage and explanatory competence, suggesting that citizens don’t just want someone to name enemies; they want someone to map cause and effect and then act.
Contextually, it’s a post-crisis memory play - an appeal to the New Deal as the gold standard for emergency legitimacy, and a reminder that credibility is built by showing your work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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