- New York City Mayor Eric Adams compared himself to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Tuesday.
- Adams previously declared himself the "face of the new Democratic Party" in June 2021.
- The mayor said FDR confronted a "cascade of crises not unlike what we are experiencing today."
After walking on stage to Frank Sinatra, New York City Mayor Eric Adams touted his first 100 days in office and compared his experience to that of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the wake of the Great Depression.
"This is the way President Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose to lead, and his example inspires me," Adams said on Tuesday. "In the years after the Great Depression, America faced a cascade of crises not unlike what we are experiencing today. Then, just as now, there was no easy solution or quick fix."
Adams then referred to himself using the three initial formation, a sign of prestige in American politics that became popularized by Roosevelt and former President John F. Kennedy.
"FDR, like ELA, understood that people needed an honest reckoning of the problems and bold plans to solve them," Adams said.
It is not uncommon for Adams to refer to himself in the third-person, and he declared himself the "face of the new Democratic Party" in his preemptive victory speech on June 24 as votes were still being tabulated in New York's first use of ranked choice voting.
President Joe Biden has also pointed to FDR as his political role model, and the comparison loomed large over the early days of his administration as he pursued an ambitious legislative agenda, which has since stalled following the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
While the three-initial formation has traditionally been reserved for a select few politicians by the public, former President Lyndon Baines Johnson made a conscious effort to be referred to as "LBJ" long before he was JFK's vice president.
"FDR–LBJ, FDR–LBJ. Do you get it?" Johnson wrote to one of his assistants while he was serving in the Senate, according to biographer Robert Caro. "What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials."