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(Ocasio-Cortez closes ranks with the Pelosi wing of the DP. Watch
Jacobin/DSA fall into line as the election draws near.)
NY Times, May 14, 2020
In Bid for Party Unity, Biden Moves Beyond Restoring the Pre-Trump Era
By Katie Glueck and Astead W. Herndon
Throughout the Democratic presidential primary, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s
rivals criticized his focus on restoring America to the pre-Trump era,
accusing him of promoting a backward-looking political vision that
ignored the deep-rooted causes of the nation’s problems.
Mr. Biden’s message to voters sometimes fueled that perception: He
constantly invoked the Obama legacy. He leaned on longtime party donors
and endorsements from establishment Democrats — some of whom had been
out of office for years. He criticized some of the progressive ideas of
his primary rivals.
But as he steps into the general election having vanquished the party’s
left wing, and the nation reels from a pandemic that has devastated the
economy, Mr. Biden is striking fewer of the moderate notes that won him
the nomination, instead courting progressives with a new openness to
systemic disruption.
The clearest sign of that shift came on Wednesday, when Mr. Biden
announced a slate of joint policy task forces with Senator Bernie
Sanders focused on issues ranging from climate change to criminal
justice reform. The task force members include stalwart Biden allies,
but also a who’s who of “Medicare for all” champions, advocates for
eliminating college debt, and critics of the Obama administration’s
immigration policy — the kind of activists who have long been skeptical
of Mr. Biden’s more incremental instincts.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, perhaps the
nation’s most prominent young progressive, is co-chair of the climate
change task force along with former Secretary of State John Kerry, a
significant development as Mr. Biden seeks to improve his standing with
younger and more liberal voters.
While the task forces have yet to convene, and it is far from clear
whether they will produce policy results or simply the appearance of
political harmony, Mr. Biden is plainly trying to unite the most
progressive wing of the party with the Democratic establishment. That’s
a goal critical to delivering a big Democratic vote against President
Trump, and his united Republican Party, in November.
“I think I can speak for a lot of young people in that I was not
motivated or inspired by Biden’s refrain of a return to normalcy,” said
Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the progressive climate
activism group Sunrise Movement, who will join Ms. Ocasio-Cortez on the
climate policy working group. “If you want to energize our generation,
give us a vision of what we’re fighting for — and not just what we’re
fighting against.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Biden has detailed an agenda that increasingly
features progressive policies and language. Where he once pitched a
message anchored in electability, he has now embraced a rhetorical stew
that mixes the “hope” of former President Barack Obama with the populism
of Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren.
It’s a reflection of political sensitivity to the national mood, which
risks turning to overwhelming anger as economic pain builds. But it is
also an implicit acknowledgment that Mr. Biden cannot win by merely
promising to remove Mr. Trump.
“Yes, I’ve endorsed Vice President Biden and yes, we’re working to help
organize progressives,” said Representative Barbara Lee of California, a
former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “But we have to
make sure that an agenda that speaks to the aspirations of all Americans
is an agenda that he embraces.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Biden’s words and his policies have drifted left.
He announced a new plan last week focusing on systemic racism, and
indicated in a Snapchat interview that he supported a federal rent
bailout. In discussing big businesses and stimulus money, he recently
snarled in a Politico interview, “This is the second time we’ve bailed
their asses out.”
And this month, he was co-author of an op-ed article with Ms. Warren in
McClatchy newspapers, acknowledging that “for many Americans, our
economy wasn’t working even before the devastation of the Covid-19 crisis.”
“The blinders have been taken off,” Mr. Biden said at a recent
fund-raiser. “Because of this Covid crisis, I think people are
realizing: ‘My Lord. Look at what is possible.’”
Such a messaging shift presents both opportunities and challenges for
Mr. Biden, who spent much of the primary keenly focused on how a
presidential candidate’s promises would play in moderate states and in
down-ballot races in the general election.
His recent words have been met with skepticism from progressive critics,
who argue that his long legislative record in Washington suggests that
the current changes are cosmetic. At the same time, at another
fund-raiser, a donor told Mr. Biden’s wife that the candidate was
already moving too far to the left — an illustration of the competing
forces Mr. Biden must navigate.
Mr. Biden’s advisers have indicated to donors and other supporters this
spring that the campaign is focused on uniting the Democratic Party
before turning to broader general election outreach.
Jared Bernstein, who during Mr. Biden’s vice-presidential tenure served
as his chief economic adviser and continues to informally advise him,
said it was a “fair conclusion” that Mr. Biden’s calls for change had
grown more pointed in recent weeks. Mr. Bernstein said that the economic
ruin and the struggles of the Trump administration “loom very large for
him,” given Mr. Biden’s role in leading the Obama administration’s
response to the recession in 2009.
“Like many of us, he’s trying to suss out whether we’re at a kind of
turning point,” Mr. Bernstein said, “where on the other side of this
virus a lot of people are going to look around and say, ‘We need a far
more competent government sector that can insulate us from shocks that
come fast and furiously in a global economy.’”
More urgently, the mark of a successful campaign will be if
working-class Americans believe that “Joe Biden’s on my side and Donald
Trump betrays workers,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, a pro-labor Democrat
of Ohio, who speaks regularly with Mr. Biden’s staff.
In any earlier presidential cycle, Mr. Biden’s policy proposals could
have been considered far-reaching — promoting a public option for health
care, for example, and embracing the overarching themes of the Green New
Deal to combat climate change.
But throughout the primary, he opposed many of progressives’ litmus-test
issues. He also predicted that the Republican Party will have an
“epiphany” once Mr. Trump is out of office, a view of political
compromise that some Democrats believe is out of step with Trump-era
tribalism.
Despite that skepticism, party leaders who have recently endorsed him,
including Mr. Obama, Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren, have each pitched Mr.
Biden’s potential administration as one capable of ushering in an era of
progressive change.
At a recent virtual fund-raiser, Mr. Biden described a need to move in a
bolder direction — while also avoiding Mr. Sanders’s brand of democratic
socialism.
“Look at the institutional changes we can make — without us becoming a
socialist country, or any of that malarkey,” Mr. Biden said.
The remark ruffled some on the left who thought Mr. Biden was being
dismissive, while some conservatives accused him of using a crisis to
press his agenda. But amid skyrocketing unemployment and significant
disapproval of Mr. Trump’s handling of the crisis, it captured how Mr.
Biden is one of many politicians adjusting their ideological framing to
the scale of the current crisis.
Former Representative Steve Israel of New York, a Biden ally, said the
former vice president must navigate a fine line: engage progressives
without alienating moderates, like those who helped him secure the
nomination.
“You cannot afford to allow a swath of the electorate to sit home
stewing on Election Day,” he said.
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