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Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders are cooperating on joint task forces to shape the Democratic policy agenda ahead of the 2020 election.
The long-awaited joint policy task forces, agreed to as a condition of Bernie Sanders’s endorsement of Joe Biden, were at last appointed last week. But how will this process actually work and what difference will it make?
The good news: There are some terrific Bernie people on the task forces, and some of the Biden appointees are impressive as well. For instance, three senior trade unionists, all progressive, are serving—Mary Kay Henry, president of SEIU; Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT; and AFSCME President Lee Saunders. And all three are appointees of Biden.
The not-so-good news is that the Biden staffer coordinating the task force process is Carmel Martin, who served as an assistant secretary of education under Arne Duncan, one of Obama’s worst appointees. Duncan was a big proponent of “teach to the test,” charter schools, and closing “failing schools.”
Charters and public-school bashing are an obsession for hedge fund Democrats, many of whom are big financial backers of Biden. The 2016 Democratic platform called for an expansion of charters.
Martin is now a senior official at the Center for American Progress, a liberalish think tank close to the Clintons that is one big degree more centrist than where the Biden campaign needs to be. CAP is the Biden campaign’s default setting.
My reporting suggests that the task forces will meet about weekly and produce policy papers. Since Biden is the candidate, and each task force has a majority of Biden appointees, he will have the final say. Yet he will be under a lot of pressure to move in Sanders’s direction. Several of his recent policy proposals have already done so.
Some emblematic issues will include student debt and free public higher education, Medicare for All, and expansive climate and public-investment efforts.
Biden has already come out for partial relief for college debt, as well as free public higher education for students with family incomes below $125,000. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had much more expansive proposals on both.
On the health insurance front, Biden’s rather weak proposal to reduce the Medicare eligibility age to 60, and add other subsidies, stops well short of even an incremental path to true universal single-payer coverage. This will also be an area of contention, with several superb advocates of single-payer on the health task force, including Mary Kay Henry; Pramila Jayapal, co-author of the House Medicare for All bill; Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former Michigan candidate for governor; and Dr. Don Berwick, former Obama head of Medicare and Medicaid, who emerged as a born-again single-payer advocate when he ran for governor of Massachusetts.
On climate, the co-chair of the joint task force is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her version of a Green New Deal goes far beyond what Biden has proposed. Yet the fact that these people are even meeting together is a good sign.
The task force on economic policy includes two people on Biden’s own economic working group, Jared Bernstein and Ben Harris. It prudently excludes another senior Biden economic adviser, Larry Summers, whose role the campaign is trying to downplay.
Then it adds three Sanders designees: Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants; Darrick Hamilton, an expert on economic and racial inequality; and Stephanie Kelton, a leading author of Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that government should borrow and spend as much as it needs to. That doctrine, which was dismissed as fringe not long ago, has become not only mainstream but conventional.
Today, it’s hard to see much difference in the views of Kelton and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin or Fed Chair Jerome Powell, except of course on where we should be spending. Indeed, events have moved even to the left of Bernie, who has been strict in insisting that all of his new spending be offset by “pay-fors,” mainly taxes on the rich. Now large deficits are not only OK but de rigueur. Meanwhile, as the economic task force meets, so does Biden’s daily call with his own, partly overlapping senior economic team.
The task force process is one of several influencing Biden’s campaign and prospective presidency. Another factor is Elizabeth Warren, who is her own source of influence on public debate generally and on Biden personally. Several of the best policy proposals are Warren’s.
The task forces are a welcome addition. They will help push Biden in a more progressive direction and will help keep the Bernie base on board.
Events are unmistakably pushing Biden to be a far more progressive candidate (and one hopes president) than he would have been without the Warren and Sanders campaigns and without the economic collapse produced by the pandemic.
But what will become of these task force proposals? My sources say that their destination is the Democratic platform. The platform is likely to be well to the left of its 2016 counterpart. The question is how much that matters.
Bottom line: The task forces are a welcome addition. They will help push Biden in a more progressive direction and will help keep the Bernie base on board. At the end of the day, however, they will be one of several tributaries into the turbulent river that is the Biden campaign. Even more than in most campaigns, ultimately what will matter most is personnel.
