Former President Barack Obama argued that it is not strange that Joe Biden has adopted policies further Left than what he ran on in the primary that are closer to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s governing vision.
“If you look at Joe Biden’s goals and Bernie Sanders’s goals, they’re not that different, from a forty-thousand-foot level,” Obama told the New Yorker in a recent interview that was published Sunday. “They both want to make sure everybody has healthcare. They want to make sure everybody can get a job that pays a living wage. They want to make sure every child gets a good education.”
Obama suggested that the difference is tactics rather than policy and that the coronavirus pandemic, along with other political changes, has changed more than Biden has.
“A lot of times, the issue has to do with ‘How do we go about that, and what are the coalitions we need?'” Obama said. “What I think the moment has done is to change some of those calculations, not because necessarily Joe’s changed but because circumstances have changed.”
Biden ran on a more centrist platform that rejected his left-wing competitors’ visions of single-payer healthcare and student loan debt forgiveness. Soon after it became clear that he was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, however, Biden adopted key proposals from the two biggest leftists in the primary field: a proposal from Sanders to make all public higher education free for those with annual family incomes less than $125,000 and a proposal favored by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to reform the bankruptcy system.
The Biden campaign worked with aides and allies of Sanders, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to form a “Unity Task Force” that created recommendations for the Democratic Party platform.
Sanders has said that he thinks Biden could be “the most progressive president since FDR.”
Despite that left-wing turn, last week’s virtual Democratic convention focused heavily on emotion and dislike of President Trump in an effort to court Republicans and centrists rather than highlighting the left wing of the party.
