Watch What You Say, or They’ll Be Calling You a Radical

The Roosevelt Institute report seems logical and obvious to me, but it’s radical by Democratic standards

Author

mister mix
October 29, 2025

The excuse makers have already weighed in with their Biden post-mortems (tl;dr: it wasn’t their fault, hire them for the next campaign.) Now we get the people who have thought seriously about the future of the Democratic Party, some folks named the Roosevelt Institute, and their report is from people who get it. Sample:

  • Prioritize crisp, resonant, and timely policies: Both Congress and executive branch leaders should choose—and relentlessly prioritize—some broadly resonant big swings whose results will be felt concretely on the ground within the term. Interviewees identified several design features that can help:

    • on-the-ground execution timelines that match the timelines of elected mandates;

    • simple, crisp designs that are memorable, easy to communicate, and well-suited to reaching and mobilizing the public via the bully pulpit; 

    • universal designs, rather than means-tested or discretionary programs that have narrower constituencies and/or bury the win in paperwork; 

    • directly administered programs that don’t rely on intermediaries who can add delay, increase costs, and obscure credit; 

    • policies with identifiable outside champions and beneficiaries ready and willing to mobilize and fight for them; and

    • hooks for direct outreach and on-the-ground organizing that help beneficiaries understand the policy and take civic action based on their experience with it.

  • Do the homework now: To be able to execute within the term, an administration must do the homework in advance to be ready to launch such policies within weeks or months of taking office, not years. Interviewees flagged the need for parallel planning workstreams to ensure bold, swift execution of a positive economic agenda even while government institutions are being rebuilt:

You’d think this would be the obvious think that any political party would want to do, but the Democratic policymaking and legislating capabilities have been overly cautious, way too wonkish and have been pushed out far too slowly. (Also, I’m a broken record, but the Roosevelt recommendations are exactly what Morena and Claudia Sheinbaum are doing in Mexico.)

Greg Sergeant has a piece on the report that summarizes some of the high points:

One of its most compelling conclusions is that the Biden administration seemed reluctant to engage in “picking the fights worth having” and sometimes took refuge in incremental policy gains due to a self-limiting “risk aversion.” One senior official is quoted suggesting the White House didn’t give adequate support to agency leaders who thought they had a policy stance providing an opening to “have a fight and show who you’re for.”

Julie Su, the labor secretary under Biden, suggests this is a big reason Democrats lost working people to Trump. “We were facing 40 or 50 years of backsliding for working people,” Su told me. “What we needed was to meet that moment with boldness. There was too much hesitation.”

Su notes, for instance, that the Labor Department didn’t exercise its powers to the fullest extent possible to hold corporations responsible for things like wage theft and weak worker safety protections. She noted more could have been done to facilitate job and retirement insecurity and boost union power.

One of the big fears of the Biden Administration was getting reversed in court, which is kind of funny (not ha-ha funny, of course) considering the lawless fucks that are in power now.

Basically, Biden’s four years had some great policies, which were implemented too slowly, and they didn’t talk about all the good they were doing every day, all day long. This report lists the stuff that Democrats need to do to prepare for exercising power, if we ever get it again.

Totally unrelated but funny as hell:

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