Biden: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television "

The gaffe is not as bad as it has been made out to be. First of all, Biden never said FDR was president in 1929. Second, in 1929, FDR, as governor of NY, started giving RADIO addresses. Four years later, and still during the depression, he started giving them as president. Wanna bet that during one of his many radio addresses he didn't talk about the crash of '29? Biden's only error was in saying "television", when he should have said radio. Big deal.

dharma41 is right.

While certainly Sen. Biden misspoke regarding Franklin Roosevelt getting on television (when in fact, he addressed audiences via radio and presumably theater newsreels), it is absolutely factual that it was Franklin Roosevelt (D), then governor of NY, who forcefully decried the apparent indifference and hostility to Federal level reforms seen by the Republican Hoover administration. Roosevelt pressed the administration publicly and vociferously for regulatory reform. He then launched his 1932 landslide election campaign based on those and subsequent reforms.
Sen.

Biden was essentially correct, despite the obvious error about television. It was indeed Franklin Roosevelt that rose to the challenge of the stock market collapse that the Hoover administration got the U.S. into.