Biden adviser pushes back on comment that president wasn’t elected ‘to be FDR’

White House senior adviser Cedric Richmond on Sunday pushed back on comments made by Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) last week that President Biden was not elected “to be FDR,” contending that Biden was voted in to “do big things.”

Spanberger made headlines last week when she told The New York Times that Biden was elected by the American people to “be normal and stop the chaos” and not to be FDR — a reference to former President Franklin Roosevelt, who helped the U.S. recover from the Great Depression with New Deal policies in the 1930s.

“Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos,” Spanberger told the Times amid tumultuous negotiations among Democrats to come to a consensus on infrastructure and a social spending package.

Asked by guest host Bill Hemmer on “Fox News Sunday” if Spanberger was wrong after the House on Friday approved the Senate-passed $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, sending it to Biden’s desk for final signature, Richmond said, “I think she is.”

“People elected President Biden to do big things,” Richmond said.

He cited the U.S.’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic before emphasizing the president’s infrastructure package.

“One is to get the pandemic under control. We’ve lost 750,000 Americans. And let’s just point to the economy. The president has added 5.6 million jobs to this economy, brought the unemployment rate down to 4.6 percent, two years faster than the Congressional Budget Office expected. That’s big things, doing infrastructure and getting this bipartisan bill done that many presidents could not do,” Richmond said.

“That’s big things, and the president has an ambitious plan for the American People, for the American economy, and he’s going to invest in them,” Richmond added.

He responded to Spanberger’s comments, telling Hemmer, “If you want to describe it as FDR-like, then it’s FDR-like.”

The House passed the infrastructure bill in a bipartisan fashion on Friday, capping months of negotiations that were drawn out due to disagreements within the Democratic Party.

House moderates were pushing for the bill to be passed after the Senate approved it in August, but progressives demanded that the larger social spending package, dubbed the Build Back Better Act, be brought up at the same time. Negotiations for that package, however, had been ongoing.

The caucus ultimately agreed to approve the infrastructure bill and advance the spending package.