The New Yorker did a piece on Joe Biden, wondering if he would be able to maintain his hold on the center until November. It was a fair question at the time. This piece spent a lot of time drawing on Biden’s personal history. They wanted everyone to know that Biden has made a major transition. He’s no longer the pragmatic centrist that we have known him to be.
If you let the New Yorker tell it, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is his new role model and this is who he would like to emulate as president. These comments were not provided by President Trump or his campaign, either. We have all grown weary of his attempts painting Biden as some budding socialist anyway. It’s not like Biden is going to get in office and start slashing police budgets.
By choosing a former attorney general as his running mate and promising to actually increase police spending, Biden has sounded off the alarm for centrists. Don’t worry, pragmatists, Joe Biden is still your patron saint. Data for Progress co-founder Sean McElwee, Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchell, and former President Barack Obama provide the quotes for the New Yorker piece.
“I think a lot of people who just [crap] on the Democratic Party haven’t spent a lot of time talking to mainstream actors within the Democratic Party ecosystem,” said Sean. He believes that the party is actually more liberal than they get credit for. McElwee does make some valid points when it comes to Biden’s relationship with the rest of the party.
“I think people should just take a step back and look at what Biden has done. A.O.C. is someone I like a lot. She said that she wouldn’t vote for him in the primary, and that in a different country she would be in a different party from him. And he could have responded to that by being, like, ‘[Screw] you.’ But instead, he responded to that by being, like, ‘How about you come in and write my climate policy?’ ”
As for Mitchell, he believes that true Biden is in the eyes of the beholder. “…he can be a product of either your most cynical thinking or a product of your most optimistic thinking,” said Mitchell. Obama did his usual Joe Biden cheerleading, claiming that Biden’s goals do not actually differ very much from Bernie Sanders’ on a “40,000-foot level”.
Evan Osnos, New Yorker reporter, believes that Biden decided to run a typical campaign in reverse. He remained moderate during the primaries and is now swinging further left. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is making sure that the world knows he and Biden are not actually aligned ideologically. In fact, he mentioned this fact multiple times.
He made the comments during a live stream speech and reiterated them during a Facebook round table. The New York Times used these comments as a means of beefing up the Biden moderate narrative. John Kasich, a former Republican, even came out during the Democratic National Convention to remind people that Biden would never turn too far left and and abandon them.
This is a man who is currently trying his best to be everything to everyone. Either he’s FDR junior or he’s the same Biden that he always has been. We would be willing to bet on the former but a lot of people are claiming that the latter is actually true. Since he is running against a candidate who is banking on nationalism to carry the day, it remains to be seen as to whether this strategy will remain effective.
The time has come for the Biden campaign to pick a direction and stick to it. Biden may believe that Trump is incompetent enough for it not to matter. If this is the way that he is leaning, he’d better wake up fast. Trump is not out of this yet, not by a long shot.
