‘Stealth Radical’? Biden’s Program Was No Secret
https://www.nysun.com/national/stealth-radical-bidens-program-was-no-secret/91497/
Six months ago, Joe Biden was supposedly a moderate. Now, he supposedly wants to restructure the fundamentals of the American economy. This narrative is dismaying, because it suggests that Mr. Biden got elected by voters with inaccurate information about Mr. Biden’s plans.
The most nefarious spin on it — call it the “stealth radical” explanation — is that Mr. Biden and his allies in the press were intentionally misleading the voters, falsely portraying the candidate as a moderate by hiding his far-left plans.
The most generous interpretation — call it the “surprise conversion” narrative — is that Mr. Biden somehow changed his mind, entirely sincerely, after the election. Even that is problematic in terms of small-d democratic theory.
Where is the mandate or consent of the governed from the electorate for an agenda that the candidate, before the election, denied having?
A pre-election news article on the front page of the Sunday, October 18, 2020, New York Times mocked what the article called “a curious charge at the center of President Trump’s re-election effort: Mr. Biden, the president insists, is eager to do the far-left bidding of violent agitators and other assorted radicals.” The Times reported that Biden is actually “a 77-year-old moderate.”
The issue came up in the first presidential debate, on September 29, 2020. Mr. Trump said, “Joe, you agreed with Bernie Sanders, who’s far left.” Mr. Biden replied, “The fact of the matter is I beat Bernie Sanders.”
Now that Mr. Biden is actually in office, the tune has shifted. The New York Times hasn’t come out directly and apologized. The newspaper does, though, seem to be implicitly conceding that Mr. Trump had a point when he depicted Mr. Biden as far to the left. A front-page New York Times article on April 29, 2021, described the president as seeking “a fundamental reorientation of the role of government not seen since the days of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal.”
A May 3 Times news article quotes Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute as claiming that Mr. Biden’s plan “is fundamentally restructuring how the economy works.”
A Yale professor, Samuel Moyn, writes in the May 3 Times, summing up the conventional wisdom, “After breaking through in the Democratic primaries as a centrist, Mr. Biden has surpassed his party’s expectations for the scale of his vision and moved sharply to the left in his early days in office.”
The problem with both the “stealth radical” and “surprise conversion” stories, though, is that they ignore that Mr. Biden’s plans and rhetoric were available in plain sight before the election. How far-left or radical they really are isn’t clear.
Republicans have an interest in depicting them that way to try to puncture the perception of a centrist Biden, which has been a political winner for Democrats. The press, fighting post-Trump declines in ratings and web traffic, has a commercial interest in hyping whatever Mr. Biden does as historic and exciting rather than incremental and boring. The Democratic left would like to energize donors by portraying progressive victories.
Feature Biden’s plan for free community college. I wrote about that in May 2019 for Education Next. My article began, “Joseph Biden, in his first campaign appearance in New Hampshire as a declared 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, says he would make two years of community college free to students.”
The article concluded, “Several states, including Tennessee and Nevada, already provide free community college to in-state residents, so Biden can argue that he’s just expanding nationwide a plan that even some Republican governors have supported.” A fundamental restructuring?
Another example is Mr. Biden’s $2.3 trillion “build back better” infrastructure plan. In March 2020, a Wall Street Journal article was headlined, “Trump Calls for New $2 Trillion Infrastructure Bill.” The article reported on a Trump tweet that said in part, “With interest rates for the United States being at ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long awaited Infrastructure Bill. It should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars.”
A “fundamental reorientation”? Mr. Biden could plausibly claim here that he is just following through on Trump’s bipartisan and mainstream agenda.
Even Mr. Biden’s proposed increase in capital gains taxes is hardly a post-election surprise. I wrote a pre-election item headlined “Biden’s Plan to Double the Capital Gains Tax.” Presidential tax-rate proposals often are mere opening offers in negotiations with Congress. We’ll see where the final rate winds up.
This morning one of the few aides accompanying Mr. Biden on Marine One for the start of a short trip to Yorktown, Virginia, was Bruce Reed, the deputy White House chief of staff. Mr. Reed is a former domestic policy aide to President Clinton, and he is strongly identified with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Mr. Reed wrote a book with Rahm Emanuel, who was also an aide to Mr. Clinton.
It stretches the bounds of credibility that Bruce Reed is advancing some kind of Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren agenda to restructure the capitalist economy fundamentally. It’s possible. Mr. Clinton raised taxes and tried to take over health care before moving to the center after Republicans won the House in 1994. But it’s unlikely.
Mr. Reed, at least, understands that the ability of Mr. Biden or Mr. Biden’s chosen successor to win election in 2024 depends on the Democratic candidate’s ability to repeat the 2020 and 1996 feat of at least looking to voters like a moderate.
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