On domestic issues, Joe Biden is slated to govern half a mile to the left of Barack Obama. Running mate Kamala Harris’s prosecutorial and judiciary record indicates that she’ll redirect law enforcement and the courts to come after churches and guns while rioters are given free rein. Biden has already backed what would be the most bloated budget in the nation’s history.
With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stephanie Kelton given slots on the presumptive Democratic nominee’s policy planning committees, there are only a few hints that Biden’s domestic policy agenda will look much different from that of a President Bernie Sanders.
But on foreign policy, the area where presidents arguably have the most power in practice, conservatives and the world as a whole dodged a massive bullet when Biden took the nomination over Sanders. For all of his and Harris’s foibles, their brand of foreign policy will likely fall in the Obama-esque strain of neoliberal sensibility, not the Chomsky-style divestment from democracy promotion that would have hijacked the Democratic Party had Sanders won the presidency.
Any presidential candidate who wins a major party nomination has, at worst, a 30% chance of becoming the leader of the free world. Thus, it was nuts when conservatives hoped aloud that Sanders would clinch the nomination to bolster President Trump’s odds. Given the coronavirus’s devastating impact on Trump’s reelection odds, for foreign policy sake’s alone, we ought to be thanking our lucky stars that it would be President Biden and Vice President Harris picking up a 3 a.m. phone call rather than Sanders and, say, Secretary of State Ilhan Omar or Ambassador to the United Nations Rashida Tlaib.
And if you need any evidence of just how stark this difference is, simply look at how these two factions responded to the extraordinary news that Trump brokered a historic peace deal to get the United Arab Emirates to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. Here we have Biden, lauding the peace deal and promising that his administration would build upon it, not just reflexively destroy it because Orange Man Bad.
Biden says in a statement: “The UAE’s offer to publicly recognize the State of Israel is a welcome, brave, and badly-needed act of statesmanship… A Biden-Harris Administration will seek to build on this progress, and will challenge all the nations of the region to keep pace.”
— Jacob Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) August 13, 2020
And here we have Tlaib, a leading campaign surrogate for Sanders, who has remained silent on the peace deal:
The focus needs to be on promoting solidarity between Palestinians & Israelis who are joining together in struggle to end an apartheid system. We must stand with the people.
This Trump/Netanyahu deal will not alleviate Palestinian suffering—it will further normalize it.
— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) August 13, 2020
Would Biden have moved the embassy to Jerusalem? No. And he would surely continue the Obama administration’s softness on China, Iran, and Russia. But lip service and stable aid are orders of magnitude better than the sycophancy and sanctioning of democracies that we would get from a Sanders administration.
Biden and Harris vocally support Israel. They have not been silent about China’s persecution of Uighurs in Xinjiang, and Biden, at least, has acknowledged Juan Guaido as the democratically elected leader of Venezuela.
In contrast, Sanders has never met a socialist dictator he didn’t like. People have become aware of his youthful celebration of the Soviet Union and the Sandinistas, but of course, he has also made excuses for China and Cuba on the Democratic debate stage this year.
Although Sanders never teased out how he would staff his administration, surrogates such as Omar and Tlaib would surely have earned high-profile slots. Sanders delegates demanded that he consider the communist-sympathizing, anti-Israel Barbara Lee and Karen Bass as running mate.
As it stands, Biden has a greater than 50% chance of winning the presidency come November. His domestic priorities may spell fiscal doom and pose an ample threat to civil liberties, but lest we forget, we dodged a monumental bullet in having the sane faction of the Democratic Party keep the Castro-ite Left at bay for at least the next four years.
