Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden during a campaign rally at Eakins Oval in Philadelphia, May 18, 2019.
Who exactly are the key players on Joe Biden’s economic-policy team? The campaign isn’t saying. And that silence speaks volumes. It’s almost as if they want to keep it a secret.
Biden is doing a very delicate dance with progressives, whose enthusiastic support he will need in November. Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have endorsed Biden, and in return their supporters expect them to exercise significant influence on Biden’s campaign and personnel.
Biden’s most recent gesture to progressives is a carefully choreographed courtship of Warren, who made a lovely, warm-hearted home video endorsing Biden. A top Biden adviser, reportedly Anita Dunn, advised Warren’s people that she was now on the short list as a possible Biden running mate. Warren reciprocated by telling Rachel Maddow that if offered the VP job, she would accept.
This is a deft ploy by the Biden camp to try to keep Warren from making public criticisms of the candidate. But if Biden or his people think Warren can be played in that fashion, they underrate her. (Likewise Sanders.)
Warren will refrain from criticizing Biden, but she will keep up her superb outpouring of the policies that the country should be pursuing. If Biden’s versions of policy proposals fall short of that standard, people will notice.
Warren also has a good personal relationship with Biden. We can expect that she will use that to go over the heads of more-centrist Biden staff and have direct conversations with him. So she will continue playing both the outside role and the inside role that she does so well.
Biden’s own instincts on several key economic issues are decent, given some positive reinforcement. He was the point person for public-works spending in the Obama recovery plan. He was a critic of the soft regulatory treatment of Wells Fargo, after that bank was busted for creating fake accounts. He has come around to Warren’s long-standing views of bankruptcy reform.
His late son, Beau Biden, former attorney general of Delaware, was one of the more aggressive of the state AGs working to protect homeowners from rapacious banks in the wake of the subprime collapse. Biden, who cherishes Beau’s memory, carries some of that legacy.
Most recently, Biden put out a proposal for German-style job sharing, which is a vast improvement over the current scheme for unemployment relief under the CARES Act. That act requires people to first be laid off in order to get assistance. Biden’s approach would invert that perverse incentive, and subsidize employers for keeping people on the job.
Biden has some part-time progressive economic advisers, which the campaign has not been shy about advertising. They include Jared Bernstein, Biden’s chief economic adviser when he was vice president; Heather Boushey, head of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth; and Richard Cordray, former head of the Warren-sponsored Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. His former chief of staff, the progressive Ted Kaufman, who later served the final two years of Biden’s senate term, is also in the mix.
The risk is that the campaign is also vulnerable to being invaded by Wall Street people, and the nuances of Wall Street regulation are not Biden’s strong suit. As he looks to the party‘s traditional “experts,” there is a grave danger of capture.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled “The Biden Do Not Reappoint List,” starting with Larry Summers. I’ve written several emails to campaign officials, asking them to tell me names of Biden’s other advisers. No response.
Think about this: If Biden is relying on the same usual suspects, and his top handlers are ashamed to divulge their names, that won’t stay secret for long. And when the names do come out, it will infuriate the very progressive grassroots activists and leaders whom Biden is hoping to reassure with decent policy proposals.
We can expect a real dogfight over the coming months over who controls the campaign’s messaging and who gets the top policy jobs in a Biden administration (we hope). Those decisions are far more consequential than policy proposals put out in a campaign, which will be soon forgotten.
The risk is that the campaign is vulnerable to being invaded by Wall Street people, and the nuances of Wall Street regulation are not Biden’s strong suit.
The Wall Street crowd, both inside and outside the Biden tent, will fiercely resist any meaningful role for Elizabeth Warren, whether as a running mate or as Treasury Secretary. Her policies, if enacted, would produce long-overdue reform of the banks’ and shadow banks’ predatory business models. It also gets deeply personal, since Warren took the lead among Democratic senators in 2013 in blocking Obama’s effort to appoint Summers to a long-sought post as chair of the Fed.
When Barack Obama garnered sufficient delegates to become the presumptive Democratic nominee in June 2008, he called a press conference to introduce his team of economic advisers. If Biden is not ashamed of some of his advisers, he should do the same. If he is ashamed of any, he should get rid of them.
One other interesting straw in the wind is the letter recently signed by more than 60 former leaders of Students for a Democratic Society. It was headed: “An Open Letter to the New New Left From the Old New Left.”
This is my generation. Many of the signers have gone on to be influential mainstream progressives. Several are my friends and several have written for the Prospect.
These onetime youthful radicals now regret making a grave mistake in 1968 when they allowed their fury at the Vietnam War to overcome their sense of practical alternatives, and they refused to vote for Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon. The letter says in part:
Now we fear that some on the left cannot see the difference between a capitalist democrat and a protofascist. We hope none of us learn this difference from jail cells …
Some of us think “endorsing” Joe Biden is a step too far; but we who now write this open letter all know that we must work hard to elect him.
I was not invited to sign the letter, nor to comment on the draft. Like the signers, I regret having refused to vote for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and I agree with the general sentiments. However, the letter comes close to suggesting that progressives should be a soft touch, and it left out one crucial paragraph. If I may:
We also pledge that we will press Biden hard to run and govern as a progressive, in both his policies and his appointees. We will vote for Biden as a small-d democrat against an aspiring dictator. But we do not control how others vote. If Biden expects the wholehearted backing of every possible progressive voter, he will need to earn it.
