Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're checking back in with the politics of the United States and with Gary Gerstall.

How has Joe Biden been doing?

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Hi Gary, hi Helen. We haven't talked about American politics for a while. It feels like a while. It probably isn't that long.

Gary, we 70 days in to the administration. So we got 30 days before the magic arbitrary 100 day mark.

How is Joe Biden doing? Inevitably, I'm not complaining about this. We personalize residential administrations and we talk about them through the lead figure.

But I think in Biden's case in particular, there's always a question and particularly in this case, is it really him?

Do you feel that this administration has his personal standpoint or should we be paying more attention to the people around him? Who do you think is calling the shots?

I think this is Joe Biden's presidency. He's got a good staff around him. He's made very good appointments and it also should be said that the nature of his presidency so far has been shaped by the revival of the American left.

The challenge that he has accepted and understands the left needs to be part of what he has to do going forward. He is mellow. He is in articulate at times.

I watched his news conference. It started out very slow. He couldn't find the names of the reporters on the list. But he picked up steam.

And I think the message of his campaign and also the message of his early presidency is that the man understands the challenge and is willing to think outside the box in order to repair the damage done to America during the Trump years and also put America on the road to recovery from the coronavirus and all the associated economic damage that went with it.

I think you can see that this is his presidency most clearly in the urgency with which he greets the moment and also in his being drawn very deeply to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now you could say it's a mistake for any president to compare him or herself to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He is one of the two greatest presidents of the last hundred years in terms of impact and influence. On the other hand, I would say that his first 70 days on his way to his first 100 days is more like Roosevelt's first 100 days, the legendary 100 days when he passed 15 pieces of legislation.

And I think that then any other president in my lifetime, he convened a secret meeting of historians or near historians to advise him about his predecessors Roosevelt LBJ. He did this March 2nd and details have just been released recently.

But I think it indicates he has his eye on history and he can't be the Joe Biden he was in the Senate and be successful that he has to be a different kind of player that the times have changed.

He understands the challenge he understands that he has the opportunity to make a transformative difference in American society and he is going about his business and his legislation in ways that suggests he's got to go as far as he can.

So he's not that much more articulate than he was for much of the campaign, but he's building his reputation on being a doer and a transformer. The word that he has chosen most recently to define what he's doing is that he's a paradigm changer. And it's been interesting to see how as his reputation grows among American commentators, the reputation of Obama is correspondingly shrinking.

Now some of this is just over excitement on the part of journalists wanting to be the first out of the gate to define the new presidency, but there is a sense that this is a different moment that mistakes were made by past democratic presidents in terms of their caution and that this is not a moment to be cautious, but to think big and think transformative.

Alan, do you think that it's already clear that this is not what many people assumed it would be before he took office, it's not a caretaker presidency. There was assumption that he would at best have to be a bridge from something to something.

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