Evan Vucci/AP Photo
This is a time when Biden shouldn’t find it hard to embrace more progressive policies.
Joe Biden faced a tricky challenge last night, having to fuse a talk on the coronavirus with one noting, though not celebrating, his decisive victories in the Florida and Illinois primaries (he was to win the third of the day’s primaries, Arizona’s, later in the evening). It was a bit of a tightrope walk, but he stayed on the wire.
The coronavirus part combined sober assessment with an appeal to solidaristic values. The pandemic, Biden said, requires that “we see the best in all of us,” and in a nice touch of working class sensitivity, he thanked not only the usual first responders for being there when we need them, but also grocery cashiers and “the people stocking the shelves.” This may be Biden’s best play against Trump, who is incapable of credibly suggesting we must care for one another at a time when circumstances demand it, and when the suburban Republican women who voted Democratic in 2018 demand it, too.
In the rest of his talk (which Biden delivered from his home, with lighting that turned his complexion to a 1930s Universal horror picture yellow), Biden endeavored to reach out to Bernie Sanders’ legions, commending the senator for decisively placing climate change on the Democrats’ agenda, asserting that he and Bernie shared the same goals and differed chiefly on tactics. That requires a very expansive definition of “tactics,” to be sure, but it at least made clear that Biden knows how much he needs Bernie’s supporters if he’s to win in November.
If anyone doubted that need, the age gap in yesterday’s primaries, as in all this year’s primaries, should dispel all uncertainty. Edison Research, which conducts all the exit polling for the networks and major newspapers, wasn’t able to do that yesterday due to the pandemic, but it did conduct a much smaller phone poll of voters in all three states. True to form, Biden performed smashingly among voters age 45 and up (winning 65 percent in Arizona, 76 percent in Illinois, and 71 percent in Florida), and appallingly among voters under 45 (19 percent in Arizona, 29 percent in Illinois, and 39 percent in Florida).
That Biden has now opened an unsurmountable lead in delegates, that upcoming primaries may well be postponed until no one knows when, and that campaigning in public is impossible so long as COVID-19 stalks the land, all present Sanders with diminishing possibilities for continuing his campaign. In 1920, his hero (and mine), socialist Eugene Debs, ran for president—more accurately, was run for president—while in a federal prison in Atlanta for the crime of having opposed America’s entry into World War I. Nearly one million Americans cast their vote for Debs in a gesture of disgust with the government that locked him up, support for Debs’s beliefs, and respect for Debs himself. But as Sanders looks to the coming weeks, and probably months, he may be compelled to conclude that he can no more wage a campaign than Debs could 100 years ago.
Some of the cable-news talking heads last night were speculating that perhaps Bernie and Joe could get together to work out some kind of joint platform that would satisfy both wings of the party. That evoked way too neat and top-down an image of how parties in general come together, and seemed particularly far-fetched as a description of what could happen this year. The process will surely be more incremental and drawn out, Biden will continue to inch towards Sanders’ economic positions when they’re broadly popular, as he did last weekend in expanding his advocacy of free college from two-year institutions to four-year as well. Sanders, as a candidate or ex-candidate, but in either case as a movement leader, will push him to do more on climate change, and Biden may well decide to call for a more expansive program than he has, which he certainly has the political space to do. (Everything but a ban on fracking, which he fears, with some reason, may cost him Pennsylvania in November.) There’s nothing stopping Biden from coming up with ambitious green infrastructure projects that go well beyond his current commitments.
Above all, however perverse this sounds, it’s the pandemic that gives Biden room to move left. The nation is about to go into a deep recession, and even most Republicans seem resigned to the necessity of a vast increase in public provision. This should be a time when Democrats not only back assistance to all Americans, but also go after corporations that took on debt solely to reward their shareholders, and now need the public to bail them out, as my colleague Alexander Sammon documents today in his piece on the airline industry. It shouldn’t be hard for Biden not just to recommend social distancing but also social responsibility in economic matters. He could call for an end to share buybacks and for putting employee representatives on corporate boards. (One way to do that would be to choose Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who’s introduced legislation mandating those reforms, as his running mate.)
In short, this is a time when Biden shouldn’t find it hard to embrace more progressive policies. That, and reaching out not just to Sanders but to the Squad and the host of young social democratic activists who are the core of the new progressivism, should be a profitable way he can pass the lockdown weeks ahead of us.
