“The party is me. Right now, I am the Democratic Party,” Joe Biden said during Tuesday’s presidential debate, shooting back at President Trump’s charge that “your party wants to go socialist medicine and socialist healthcare.”
Biden has been speaking proudly and resolutely about how he commands the party and its vision. “I beat the socialist,” Biden recently said, referring to Sen. Bernie Sanders, when a reporter asked him to address voter concerns about socialism. “Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career, my whole career. I’m not a socialist.”
But here’s the deal, as Biden often says: Either he is in denial about the concessions he has made to his party’s revolutionary wing, or he is deliberately trying to hide them.
After Biden became the Democratic shoo-in, the party created a Biden-Sanders unity task force. You don’t create a unity task force unless there is disunity, and there was obviously disunity between old-guard Biden and more ambitious Democrats. A number of prominent Democrats were expressly further to the Left than Biden, but they are helping to fix that.
“We did a lot of good work together to really push the vice president’s healthcare platform much further than it’s been before, to take elements of Medicare-for-all and put it into the platform,” Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal said in July, referring to the unity task force’s work.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who sat on the task force as a Sanders surrogate, believes that Biden will continue to move. “I think, overall, we can likely push Vice President Biden in a more progressive direction across policy issues,” she told Just the News. AOC was the chief sponsor of the Green New Deal, which Biden defensively said was “not my plan” at the debate, even though Biden’s official plan hails it as a “crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.” His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, co-sponsored the Green New Deal in the Senate. They are tied to it.
Ultimately, moving left is what Biden must do, according to Jayapal. “I believe that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, once we get them elected, will have to stay accountable to our base and we will continue to push in all the ways that we have done, even with Democratic presidents in the past,” she said in a Washington Post Live event in August.
Biden’s movement goes beyond his official policy platform. When he spoke about the Supreme Court fight in a speech two days after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, he said, “We need to de-escalate, not escalate.” It was a clear response to calls by some Democrats to pack the court if they win in November.
Biden has since gone mum. One day after that speech, Biden said, “It’s a legitimate question,” responding to one about court packing, “but let me tell you why I’m not going to answer that question.” During the presidential debate, after Chris Wallace asked him about packing the court and ending the Senate’s legislative filibuster, Biden gave a non-answer. When Trump then pressed him on it, Biden said, “I’m not going to answer the question.” Kamala Harris has punted similarly.
Biden must have been talked down by someone in his coalition because a call for de-escalation does not leave Democrats with a table full of options, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and AOC have all said they need in order to respond to Trump’s third Supreme Court nominee. Biden is clearly placating those like Democratic Sen. Ed Markey, whose demand that Democrats expand the court came just hours after news broke of Ginsburg’s death, and a bunch of others who have entertained that idea.
Vice President Mike Pence has called Biden a “Trojan horse,” candidate, as have others, but there is nothing secret about him. Biden may have been slower to embrace the most extreme left positions than his left-wing running mate and others, though overturning his previous position on the Hyde Amendment and his continued adoption of such positions confirm that he has ceded a lot more ground to revolutionaries than he wants to let on.
