President Joe Biden, at 81 years, is the oldest actively serving president of the United States in history. Donald Trump, who turns 78 in June, is not much younger. Americans’ concern for the advanced ages of their two leading political candidates has at times overshadowed concern about the issues themselves, and that is likely to still be the case in the upcoming November elections.

Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman says that Biden has been a great U.S. president, and that if age has not stopped him yet, there’s every reason to believe he will continue achieving major goals in a second term. Pakman reviews Biden’s accomplishments and then concludes that Biden has been “the most progressive president” since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The reality is, Joe Biden has been a good president. My expectations for Biden were based on the things he said while he was a candidate. I didn’t think he was super interested in things like student loan debt relief and cannabis legalization. He has done more student loan debt relief than any president in history. He’s requested, through the Department of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, that cannabis be de-scheduled from being a Schedule One drug, an extremely important thing that no president has done … Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS and Sciences Act, infrastructure bill, requiring Big Pharma to come to the table to negotiate drug prices on the top-10 drugs for Medicare recipients, I could go on and on and on and on. Getting us out of Afghanistan didn’t go perfectly, but it was the right thing to do. 

I believe that Joe Biden has probably been the most progressive president, by action, of any president during my lifetime, certainly of any president going back to FDR in the New Deal era, and maybe even ever. Now, does that mean that he’s Bernie Sanders? No. But compared to other presidents, I struggle to find a president that has been more progressive.