FDR had the folksy charm to directly address the public and acquired a lot of power, but in most respects he seems the opposite of a populist. He was a party insider with a complex technocratic response to the Depression voters believed actually worked, not someone who spent his time picking fights and arguing he needed more power to defeat enemies (or making complete fantasy promises like Huey Lewis), he picked up a broad voter coalition including lots of minorities he neither scapegoated nor actually defended, and was a conventional moderate for the time on foreign policy and [future] culture war issues. He was more radical and centralised than previous Presidents when it came to economic policy and the role of the executive, but it wasn't a shouty type of radicalism, especially not compared with how socialists and fascists elsewhere addressed the subject of the Depression...