The White House reinstated regular presidential speeches modeled after FDR’s “talks by the fire”, releasing a video on Saturday in which President Biden called a woman in California who had been fired during the coronavirus pandemic.
Michele Voelkert told the president that she had been fired “for the first time in my life” from her job at a San Francisco-based clothing company.
“Working is part of who you are,” Biden told Voelkert in a video posted on Twitter and other White House social media accounts. “As my father used to say, a job is much more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity, it’s about your respect, it’s about your place in the community.”
“The idea that we can keep companies open, moving and prospering without dealing with this pandemic is just an obstacle,” said the president, before releasing his economic aid package COVID.
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He pointed to provisions that include mortgage payments, unemployment insurance and rent subsidies, and the White House promise to have 100 million COVID vaccines in the arms of Americans in 100 days.
“It is an established tradition in the country to listen to the President in this way,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday about the hearth talks. “President Biden will continue that tradition and we expect it to take a variety of forms.”
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Franklin D. Roosevelt started for the first time with weekly “chat by the fireplace” speeches to speak directly to suffering Americans and explain government policy decisions during the Great Depression. The first chat aired on March 12, 1933.
Ronald Reagan revived the tradition and she continued with Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who made comments on YouTube almost every Friday.
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Donald Trump continued the tradition in the first months of his government, but ended up stopping when the White House said it felt that the format “was not used to its full potential”. Trump preferred to speak to Americans through Twitter, in impromptu comments to reporters and at rallies.