How to Win Concessions From Candidate Biden

The left—beginning with Sanders and Warren—should push him on both policy and personnel.

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With 25 states remaining in the Democratic primary, Joe Biden sits firmly in the driver’s seat for the presidential nomination. Unlikely as that may have seemed just weeks ago, the former vice president has leveraged his proximity to President Obama (who still, it should be noted, hasn’t endorsed him) and his status as the sole remaining anybody-but-Sanders candidate to rack up a meaningful delegate lead going into the back half of the competition. For the progressive wing of the party, the battle is quickly transitioning from winning the presidency to winning major concessions from its presumptive nominee.

Even Bernie Sanders admitted as much during a Wednesday address about the state of his campaign, where he previewed a handful of policy issues he intended to press the former vice president on during Sunday’s debate. “Joe,” he asked, “what are you gonna do” on health care, climate, student debt—all signature policy issues of the Sanders campaign.

You’d be hard-pressed to identify Biden’s agenda for the presidency. His policy-driven contributions during the many-months-long debate circuit were largely nonexistent. While his website features a sprawling mosaic of “bold ideas,” it’s tough to know how committed he is to any of them, given how infrequently he’s brought them up during his sporadic stump speeches, press scrums, and public appearances. The one thing we know for sure is his commitment to a return to much of Obama-era thinking, to a degree of political normalcy: the return of the “Obiden Bama” Democrat, as he calls it, perhaps with more spending on social programs.

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So—how much of an Obama-era policy platform would Biden return to? And what of Obama-era personnel? Those questions both merit individual consideration. In the words of the Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, when Barack Obama introduced his campaign economic team, “those of us who had hoped Obama would be a transformative progressive president knew that it was over before it started.”

We can turn to more recent history, as well. As progressive forces within the Democratic Party get to work hammering away at much needed concessions from a man who has in the past touted his conservative bonafides, it’s worth revisiting the last time the Democratic nominee had a center-left track record, to put it generously: 2016.

While Hillary Clinton trudged through a surprisingly fraught and contentious election process, the party’s progressive stalwarts worked on her from two angles. Bernie Sanders, of course, ran a shockingly successful campaign that was launched with the primary intention of dragging Clinton leftward on a number of policy issues. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren, starting as early as 2015, worked to ensure that Hillary wouldn’t embrace the most odious and objectionable members of the Obama cabinet, the Robert Rubin acolytes in particular—an application of Warren’s often stated belief that personnel is policy. 

It’s likely that Biden would delegate major policy decisions and implementation to advisers and staffers, many of whom would therefore have outsize influence.

The WikiLeaks dump of Clinton’s emails contained evidence of these developments in real time. Warren sent a list of presumed inside-track Clinton staffers she was opposed to, while Warren’s advisor Dan Geldon “laid out a detailed case against the Bob Rubin school of Democratic policy makers,” and was adamant about “the need to have in place people with ambition and urgency who recognize how much the middle class is hurting and are willing to challenge the financial industry.” Geldon “was very critical of the Obama administration's choices,” according to an email sent by Hillary Clinton’s chief speechwriter.

Meanwhile, the Sanders camp fought for policy concessions from the Clinton team and the DNC. He won key victories, altering the platform on Federal Reserve reform, Wall Street reform, closing the revolving door for bank regulators, establishing Postal Service banking services, closing loopholes for estates and hedge funds, and putting that revenue towards job creation, and more. He also won changes on criminal justice reform and the death penalty.

But because Hillary Clinton didn’t win in 2016, we don’t know how successful these efforts on policy would have been. It’s possible she would’ve abandoned at least some of those commitments upon arrival in the Oval Office; she may have pursued some of them ardently. But we do know that despite Warren’s efforts to minimize the Rubinites, a leaked list of probable Clinton cabinet appointments still featured a group of corporate malefactors, including Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook at Treasury and Howard Schultz of Starbucks running the Department of Labor. 

The takeaway for progressives, then, remains muddled. But Hillary Clinton was a different—and younger—leader than Joe Biden. It’s likely that Biden would delegate major policy decisions and implementation to advisers and staffers, many of whom would therefore have outsize influence. Moreover, Biden is a notorious weathervane of a politician, who swung to the right (along with the whole party) during the Clinton years, shouting his conservative impulses when they expressed the conventional wisdom, before swinging to the left as a champion of some of President Obama’s more liberal policies years later. He’s nothing if not malleable. As Sanders again spearheads the fight for the platform, for which the first real battle will happen Sunday night on the debate stage, it’s certainly worth pushing for personnel concessions as well. 

Already, we’ve gotten hints of who Biden might otherwise pursue. A few days ago, Axios reported that Biden was considering a cabinet that would make Hillary blush, featuring billionaire and former opponent Michael Bloomberg running the World Bank, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon running the Treasury. Nestled in there, too, was the suggestion that Elizabeth Warren be considered for some meaningful role, to appease progressives.

But one token representative should not and will not satisfy progressives. Biden desperately needs the grassroots and youth support of the party’s progressive wing if he wants any hope of defeating Trump, and those groups should push for major influence over the Biden cabinet— and Biden policy—when the moment for horse-trading arrives. If Tuesday’s primaries go the same as those of the last two weeks, that moment will come soon. 

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