Why it matters ... The historians' views were very much in sync with his own: It is time to go even bigger and faster than anyone expected. If that means chucking the filibuster and bipartisanship, so be it.
Four things are pushing Biden to jam through what could amount to a $5 trillion-plus overhaul of America, and vast changes to voting, immigration and inequality.
- He has full party control of Congress, and a short window to go big.
- He has party activists egging him on.
- He has strong gathering economic winds at his back.
- And he's popular in polls.
Comment: 5. He is completely manipulable.
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss told Axios FDR and LBJ may turn out to be the past century's closest analogues for the Biden era, "in terms of transforming the country in important ways in a short time."
- Beschloss said the parallels include the New Deal economic relief that Franklin Roosevelt brought in 1933, which saved the country from the Depression and chaos.
- And Biden is on track to leave the country in a different place, as Lyndon Johnson did with his Great Society programs.
- He loves the growing narrative that he's bolder and bigger-thinking than President Obama.
- This temptation to go even bigger, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell insists, will create such a fissure between the parties that he compared it this week to "nuclear winter."
- He won't rub their noses in it, we're told. That'll be the Biden touch to rolling the opposition — and getting that much closer to the status of latter-day FDR.
- Biden's list includes: rural broadband expansion, which would be transformative for those communities ... make child tax credit permanent ... landmark legislation on climate, guns, voting.
Comment: And we can bet our boots on what those reforms will be.
Comment: An unholy train wreck's coming via the government to the people. The track is laid, the wheels are greased, the engine is revving and the Commander-in-Chief has left the platform.