Moulitsas was a big Elizabeth Warren supporter in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. He saw President Trump as vulnerable, giving Democrats an opportunity to nominate a “true progressive” to oppose him. Moulitsas disliked the “moderate” wing of the party, and he particularly disliked Joe Biden. This is what Moulitsas wrote about that time:

You could go back to the primary days and read headlines I wrote about then-candidate Joe Biden. They weren’t flattering. You see, he was a dinosaur, he had a history of moderation, he wanted to chase the “bipartisan” pony, he supported George W. Bush’s Iraq War and authored the hated 1994 crime bill; he was an old white guy in a party that is as diverse as America. And his primary campaign reflected that history, arguing that he could bring Republican votes to his agenda, that what America needed was a return to Obama’s America (and nothing more dramatic), and that he wasn’t interested in anything as aggressive as the Green New Deal or other such progressive priorities.

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That was then. Now, though, Biden has pushed through Congress $1.9 trillion in “COVID relief” legislation that was also a massive social welfare measure. He has used his speech to Congress to advocate another $4 trillion in spending, much of it on cherished progressive priorities. He has dismantled the Trump system of immigration controls. And much more. Just look at the Washington Post story on the address to lawmakers: Biden “argue[d] for a dramatic expansion of government services, making a plea for sweeping plans to provide universal preschool, free community college and expanded health care and new tax breaks for families — much of it funded by higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans.”

After all that, Moulitsas is happily admitting he was wrong about Biden. Moulitsas thought Democrats were foolishly picking a “centrist.” But now, after 100 days in office, “Can anyone argue that Biden’s agenda would look much different from Warren’s, or even Bernie’s?” Moulitsas wrote this week. “The man with an entire career of staid institutionalist centrism is now forging the most progressive presidency since FDR.”

Other progressives are feeling the same. “I do think that the Biden administration and President Biden have exceeded expectations that progressives had,” Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently. “I’ll be frank, I think a lot of us expected a lot more conservative administration.”

“These are the best proposals you could ever expect,” Larry Cohen, a former union official who heads the group Our Revolution and is a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders, told NBC News. “I don’t think they would have been better if Bernie Sanders was the president.”

Even Sanders himself, who could be cranky about his rival for the Democratic nomination, sees Biden’s actions as real progressivism. “This country has moved forward, I think, at the grassroots level in a much more progressive way,” Sanders told the New York Times’ Ezra Klein. “I think the moment was ready and then you had a president who, to his credit, as everybody knows, was a moderate Democrat throughout his time in the Senate, who had the courage to look at the moment and say, you know what? I have got to act boldly.”

The bottom line: Progressives are high on Biden because he is giving them what they want. What does that mean for Republicans and conservatives?
 
It means they should stop thinking of and referring to Biden as a “moderate” or a “centrist.” Just because the president has what the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne calls a “reassuringly unradical” demeanor doesn’t mean that he really is reassuringly unradical. If Biden is pushing a radical agenda — and he is undoubtedly trying to create the impression that the United States is in the midst of a crisis that requires unprecedented spending and government action — he is not a “moderate” or a “centrist.” The president is what the president does.
 
Republicans and conservatives should look at what progressives are saying about Biden. If Moulitsas and Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders and Cohen and others are happy with Biden’s performance, it means the White House has taken a sharp turn left. The opposition needs to fully appreciate what is going on.
 
 
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