It’s Important to Be Like Ike, FDR and Maybe Joe Biden
The president’s multi-trillion-dollar proposals evoke grand historical analogies, but they also seem like smart of-the-moment politics.
Big dreams need big help.
Photographer: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a hoax-free, no-foolin’, downright humorless compendium of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. Sign up here.
Yes, we’re still talking about President Joe Biden’s ginormous infrastructure plan. It’s too ginormous not to! To pitch his proposals, Timothy O’Brien and Nir Kaissar advise Biden to take a page from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s successful 1956 campaign to sell the interstate highway system as a national security necessity. Then, the argument was that freeways would make it easier to evacuate cities in the case of a Soviet nuclear attack. Now it’s that the U.S. needs to invest in future growth to keep up with China.