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Joe Biden delivers a speech on combating the coronavirus in Wilmington, Delaware, last month.
Joe Biden is a flip-flopper whose positions on issues are always fluid, someone with few ideas that can’t be revised based on a new political reality. That may sound like an insult, but it makes him no different from many other politicians, and it will shape what his presidency looks like should he win in November. And it’s something those Democrats most skeptical of him should actually be happy about.
The truth is that changing your positions is something every politician does from time to time, even if some do it more than others. Even Bernie Sanders, for whom having a set of unwavering commitments is the core of his political identity, changed his position on guns when he went from seeking votes only in Vermont to seeking votes from the whole Democratic Party. But Joe Biden does it more readily than most. And though Sanders’s supporters see that as one of the reasons they distrust him, it’s the one quality that should make them more supportive of Biden now that he’s the inevitable Democratic nominee.
Let’s begin with what has happened in the last month or so since Biden’s lead in the delegate count became insurmountable. He has been attempting to unify the party not only by offering effusive praise for his defeated rivals, but by incorporating a number of their ideas into his policy platform. He now supports free public college for those whose parents make less than $125,000 a year. He has endorsed Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan—a particularly striking move, since it would repeal parts of a 2005 law the two clashed over when Warren was a law professor and Sen. Biden was crafting a bill friendly to the finance and credit card industries that wield such extraordinary influence in his home state.
What else? He promised to make his running mate a woman and appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court. In an explicit overture to Sanders and his supporters, he proposed lowering the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60 and forgiving all student debt for low- and middle-income borrowers who attended public colleges or private historically black colleges and universities.
Those moves have been contemptuously dismissed as inadequate by some on the left. But they followed a campaign in which despite being the leading “moderate” in the race, Biden had already moved substantially to the left of where he was for most of his career—and where the Obama administration was—on issue after issue. He proposed a public option plan that, though it’s a long way from single-payer, would still put millions more Americans on government insurance. He endorsed the Green New Deal. He advocated a $15-an-hour minimum wage. He cast off his decades-long support for the Hyde Amendment, which forbids Medicaid from paying for abortions under almost any circumstance.
He has no purity tests, and no problem with compromise.
And when he accepted Bernie Sanders’s endorsement, Biden announced the creation of six policy task forces made up representatives from both camps, to offer at least the opportunity for Sanders to have an ongoing influence on his policy formulation. It’s safe to say that if Sanders had won, he wouldn’t have been so eager to say that he’d be incorporating Joe Biden’s policy ideas into his administration.
That’s not just because ideological consistency is at the core of Sanders’s political identity, but because Sanders knows that if he did such a thing, his supporters would revolt. Biden’s won’t, because they didn’t support him out of a firm set of ideological beliefs.
You can argue that Biden hasn’t moved far enough to the left for your policy preferences, and I’d agree. What you can’t argue is that he hasn’t moved at all or won’t keep moving in the future.
That’s not because Biden is playing some kind of con, or that he’s particularly unprincipled. It’s because his instinct is to move within what he perceives as the politics of the moment and navigate a path toward a deal, whether that deal accomplishes a little or a lot. He has no purity tests, and no problem with compromise.
That is both the opportunity and the danger of a Biden presidency. If you think that his record of policy malleability makes him susceptible to pressure from people he really shouldn’t be listening to, you’re right. But it also means he’s susceptible to pressure from people he should be listening to. And that’s why energetic and shrewd organizing from the left will be more important during a Biden presidency than ever.
For instance, consider health care reform, which Biden will be obligated to pursue early in his presidency. Unlike a President Sanders, he’s not going to say, “I just don’t care what the insurance companies and the hospitals and the drug companies have to say, because all that matters is getting people secure, affordable coverage.” He’s going to listen to those interests and respond to the power they wield as he tries to come up with something that can pass Congress.
So those who want to make sure that whatever reform package Biden and Democrats come up with is at least as progressive as what he offered in the campaign (if not more) are going to have to create pressure equal to or greater than the pressure coming from industry.
It’s possible that the current public-health and economic crises—which among other things are leading to huge numbers of Americans losing their health coverage—will create more space to move large numbers of people away from the employer-sponsored private insurance system and into more secure government insurance. But that will only happen if Biden can be convinced that the rewards to him of doing so are greater than the risks.
That dynamic will repeat itself over and over in the Biden presidency. Is he going to appoint some Wall Street CEO to be Secretary of the Treasury, or a real liberal who wants to restrain the power of the finance industry? Will he back initiatives like postal banking, or lean toward further privatization of government services? Is he going to be aggressive about combating climate change, or find half measures designed not to offend big business?
The truth is that on all these questions and many more, Biden could go either way. That means that he could be either a much more conservative president than he looks now, or a much more liberal one.
Right now, as he tries to unify the party, Biden is leaning left and listening to liberals. If they want to keep it that way, they’ll have to keep their voices in his ear, and convince him that he can’t succeed without them.
