Mara Gay, a member of the New York Times editorial board, argued that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s platform is “far more liberal” than former President Barack Obama’s.
Gay discussed Biden’s apparent progressive lurch during a segment on MSNBC’s Dateline: White House on Tuesday afternoon. Host Nicolle Wallace asked her how Biden should try to represent the “ideologically diverse coalition” that supports him.
“You know, I think what’s funny is that actually, Biden’s platform is far more liberal than Barack Obama’s was years ago,” she said. “And so, when we looked at that as an editorial board, we were kind of blown away at how much more similar it is to Bernie Sanders’s platform in some ways than Barack Obama in 2008.”
She then addressed Wallace’s question, floating the idea that Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney could campaign for the Democratic presidential candidate.
“But I think culturally what Joe Biden needs to do is he needs to say that he is the campaign of the big tent,” Gay added. “And so, that might mean having, you know, Mitt Romney even at some point. Let’s remember, [he] was at a Black Lives Matter protest. The message is about — the message is that this is about more than politics. This is a year to vote for your democracy, and then, we can have substantive policy discussions later on in the family.”
