Although we’re still less than three months into the Biden administration, there’s already an eagerness all around to characterize and define his presidency. This is understandable on a psychological level⁠—we live in harrowing and uncertain times; the American people and opinion leaders are trying to understand where the country is going and how quickly we might get there. And that’s led to a grasping for historical analogues to which Biden and his agenda might be compared.

The most obvious point of reference given the scale of the crisis the country has been thrust into, and the reference point Biden himself seized upon during the campaign, has been Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And on Monday, The New York Times published a column arguing that Biden’s agenda has already measured up to his accomplishments. “With a few breaks and the skillful execution of what seems to be a smart legislative strategy, President Biden is poised to match F.D.R.’s stunning debut in office,” the author Jonathan Alter wrote. Biden, who “sees that Reagan-era market capitalism cannot alone” rebuild the country, has shown a progressive way forward in the American Rescue Plan and the American Jobs Plan. “He is the first president since Lyndon Johnson who can rightly be called F.D.R.’s heir,” Alter concludes. “Soon we’ll know if he squanders that legacy—or builds on it.”

Joe Biden Isn’t Close to Being a Historic President Yet

It’s not clear that the president even has a plan to pass the kind of legislation that would earn him comparisons to FDR.

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Alter’s column, aimed primarily at framing the American Jobs Plan as a successor to the New Deal, succeeds mostly in illustrating the size of the gap between them. As he writes, the New Deal created, with the help of large-scale direct public employment, more than 20 million jobs and led to the construction of “39,000 new schools, 2,500 hospitals, 325 airports and tens of thousands of smaller projects that did not end the Depression but eventually helped power the postwar American boom.” The $2 trillion in infrastructure spending over the next 10 years Biden has laid out in the Jobs Plan, while significant, obviously isn’t going to have a comparable impact on the American landscape. On Sunday, Lindsay Koshgarian offered some valuable perspective at Truthout: The annual cost of Biden’s infrastructure plan will be dwarfed by the amount the government spends each year on military contractors alone.

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Naturally, another factor that should complicate comparisons between the New Deal and Biden’s infrastructure plan is the fact that Biden’s infrastructure plan hasn’t passed yet and will surely be pruned and trimmed before it’s sent to the White House for Biden’s signature—an outcome that, while likely, still isn’t assured even through the reconciliation process Democrats will use to avoid a filibuster. The idea that Biden merits comparison to FDR anyway illustrates the liminal space Biden has started to occupy in Democratic hopes: as both a president just on the cusp of implementing a transformative agenda and a president who should be credited for already having done so. It shouldn’t take a cynic to recognize that he’s clearly neither—until the disposition of the administration changes and both the structural challenges to the Democratic agenda and the state of the right are addressed, Biden will be a president in limbo.

It can be conceded that the optimists are onto something: We really can see evidence of leftward movement among the policy experts populating the Biden administration and within the Democratic Party more broadly. An understanding that big and expensive government outlays can be made to work for the American people shaped the American Rescue Plan—a large expansion of welfare that abandoned inane and immoral Beltway dogmas about work and debt to provide more direct benefits to American families, along with generous public spending in other areas. This, combined with the provisions of Biden’s infrastructure plan and evidence that the administration is actively seeking input from progressives, places Biden meaningfully to the left of his Democratic predecessor.

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But while there have been real changes in perspective that have already been borne out in the Biden administration’s policies, we’re still talking about an administration that has passed exactly one (1) major piece of legislation—a “rescue” bill whose most pathbreaking provisions, including the expansion of the Child Tax Credit, are temporary, and which were sold as responses to a national emergency that will, fingers crossed, soon come to an end. Although Biden has said he supports making the expanded tax credit permanent, it’s not actually clear that it will be significantly extended in the upcoming “American Families Plan.” And as HuffPost reported Monday, Republican state legislatures are waiting, absent further Democratic action, to pounce on and gut unemployment benefits once the federal supplements extended in the Rescue Plan expire

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Those are fights that can and might be won, but there’s no real reason to characterize the administration in a way that presupposes those victories are foregone conclusions—particularly given that Biden seems poised to move more cautiously in general on spending, going forward. On Tuesday, White House Council of Economic Advisers member Jared Bernstein made a notable distinction between proposals that would and would not require explicit pay-fors in the future. “When you’re talking about the relief plan, a temporary measure, it’s perfectly fine for that to be deficit-financed,” he said. “But when you’re talking about longer-term investments—in water, in bridges, in standing up key sectors that don’t exist, in childcare, helping people to get into the job market—the sustainability, the permanence of those sectors requires robust pay-fors.”

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This is a highly contestable point. With climate policy in particular, massive, rapid, and largely debt-financed investments simply have to be made, and we probably have room for more debt spending in other areas. But Bernstein’s statement effectively conceded that the remainder of Biden’s agenda will be constrained by how easily and significantly he might raise taxes on corporations and the very wealthy given his promise not to raise income taxes on Americans making under $400,000 a year. Those will be difficult waters to tread even among Democrats in Congress, even with reconciliation as a legislative vehicle.

And for all it says about how Biden might fundamentally shift what Americans believe government can and should do, it’s noteworthy that Alter’s column contains no words to that effect from Biden himself, who Alter concedes is “no great communicator.” But Roosevelt was: He used his rhetorical gifts to encourage Americans to look beyond the immediate emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II toward a future made possible by a different kind of government from the one they had been used to⁠—not, as he said in a 1936 campaign address, a “see-nothing, do-nothing Government” or “government by organized money,” but a government capable of securing a set of basic economic rights in perpetuity. And Roosevelt acknowledged that project had and would continue to earn him dogged enemies. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred,” he famously said in that address. “I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”