Joe Biden won the primary by presenting himself as a sane bulwark against the Castro-loving socialist Bernie Sanders.
But after having captured the nomination, Biden is using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to embrace the radical left wing of the party.
To be clear, it was never fair to call Biden a centrist — as the description only made sense relative to his rivals.
Even before the coronavirus hit, Biden proposed $6 trillion in new spending in service of an unapologetically liberal agenda. With that said, it’s also true that Biden positioned himself as an opponent of the sort of transformational change being proposed by his opponents in favor of a promise to build incrementally on the legacy of his former boss, Barack Obama. He criticized the proposals of Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren as too disruptive and politically unrealistic.
Yet, what’s odd is that
having clinched the nomination, he’s desperate to avoid any sort of split within the party this fall. So he’s decided to use the coronavirus pandemic as an opening to promise a much wider agenda.
As New York magazine has put it,
Biden is now planning an “FDR-sized presidency” that would go far beyond what he campaigned on during the primary.
Though the United States has spent nearly $3 trillion on measures to respond to the economic and public health effects of the coronavirus, he said what was needed was, “A hell of a lot bigger.”
In addition to trillions more in economic relief,
Biden is contemplating much broader infrastructure and climate change legislation and pushing for expanding Social Security and forgiving large amounts of student loan debt.
During the Obama administration, Biden oversaw the troubled response to the last major economic crisis, which resulted in the slowest recovery since the Great Depression.
Back then,
his green energy promises ended up in disaster. In 2009, it was he who announced the $535 million loan to Solyndra, the solar energy firm that went bankrupt and became a poster child for Obama-era crony capitalism.
It was also Biden who announced the Obama administration’s ambitious plan to build an extensive high-speed rail network in the U.S. Yet, high-speed rail ended up being such an expensive and logistical disaster that even California’s progressive governor, Gavin Newsom, was forced to pull the plug on what was supposed to be the crowning achievement: a rail line linking San Francisco and Los Angeles.
While his campaign had already recycled many of these failed ideas, he’s now turbocharging it.
In an important signal of where his thinking is,
Biden teamed up with Sanders to create a series of six major policy advisory panels. As we’ve previously written, the climate change panel will be co-chaired by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has
proposed tens of trillions in spending as part of the Green New Deal,
with the unrealistic goal of moving the U.S. to 100% renewable energy within a decade.
His healthcare panel is now being co-chaired by Rep. Pramila Jaypal, one of the leading advocates in the House for a $34 trillion socialized health insurance plan, and
Donald Berwick, the former director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under Obama, a fan of government healthcare rationing who famously declared, “I am romantic about the [British] National Health Service; I love it."
Biden’s economic panel now includes former Sanders adviser Stephanie Kelton, one of the leading proponents of Modern Monetary Theory, w
hich posits that debt and deficits do not matter because a country that controls its own currency can always print more money to pay off its debt and purchase what it wants. Expect that perspective to dominate any Biden administration, as he takes office with trillions of dollars in new spending ambitions, while U.S. debt blows past the World War II record.
This week, Biden also co-wrote an op-ed with Warren, his other radical rival.
The coronavirus has required an unprecedented mobilization of public and private health resources and significant federal assistance to cushion the blow that has been caused by the disease and the resulting government lockdown orders.
The path back to economic prosperity lies with easing government restrictions on commerce and people, over time, feeling safer about resuming normal activities.
The crisis does not make far-left fantasies any more desirable than they were when even Democratic primary voters rejected them overwhelmingly.
Typically, candidates cater to the party’s extremes during the primaries, only to race to the center during the general election.
In Biden’s case, he won the primary by positioning himself as the reasonable centrist in the race and now is taking a sharp left turn.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/o...des-to-sanders
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