Joe Biden has offered the first glimpse of his policy vision, and it provides a window into how he’s going to built out from his role in the Obama administration while while finding a way to mollify the very loud and energetic resurgent Left that wants to move in an even more radical direction.
Though a lot of details remain to be fleshed out, Biden did provide a preview of his basic policy approach. It involves addressing many of the same concerns as his Democratic rivals, but in a less disruptive way, presenting his vision as a continuation of the Obama-Biden era.
“It’s time to start rewarding work over wealth,” Biden said, sounding like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Echoing Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Biden declared, “Healthcare’s a right, not a privilege.”
Only, he isn’t calling for a “wealth tax” on ultramillionaires or explicitly for the elimination of private insurance. Instead, he’s reviving Obama’s Buffett tax line (“Warren Buffett said it best, he should not pay a lower tax rate than his secretary has”) while calling for a capital gains tax increase and a repeal of Trump’s corporate tax cuts. He also wants to “finish the job” started by Obamacare but is dusting off the idea of giving people the option of keeping their private coverage or choosing a government-run plan (though the details will help determine how much of a choice it would really be).
Like other candidates, Biden is talking about the high cost of a college education. But he spoke about making it “affordable,” while others are speaking about making it “free,” and in Warren’s case, of canceling all student loans. He talked about the importance of clean, renewable energy and green jobs, but he isn’t calling for something as fanciful as the “Green New Deal.”
On policy after policy, Biden is going further than Obama, but not as far as his opponents. For instance, in 2013, Obama pushed hiking the minimum wage to $9 per hour. Now, Biden says it’s “well past time” that the minimum wage was increased to $15 per hour. Prices did not change that dramatically in the past six years, but the politics of the Democratic Party has. Now, other candidates are discussing ideas such as a universal basic income or a federal job guarantee or simply handing regular checks to Americans.
To be sure, Biden’s policy proposals, would have been considered well to the Left in prior eras. Yet even so, they still represent more robust versions of ideas that we’ve been debating for decades, such as raising the minimum wage. Yet, many of his rivals making the case that the party needs to move well beyond these old debates and make more substantial structural changes that would in some cases go further than even European socialist welfare states.
It’s early, but the basic battle lines for the 2020 Democratic nomination have now been drawn. Biden will be arguing that Democrats can build on the advancements of Obama, while his rivals will be arguing that Obama represented a different time and that liberals can no longer afford to be accommodative toward a system that is inherently broken.
