Center or left?
It was just last week The New Yorker published a profile of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden asking if his hold on the center could hold through November. The piece spent words upon words going over Biden’s personal history in Scranton, Pennsylvania onto Delaware then Washington, DC as first a U. S. Senator, then vice-president. It focused particularly on Biden’s apparent transition from a pragmatic centrist to someone who saw the November election as a unique opportunity in American history to be another version of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. These comments came not from President Donald Trump or his campaign, whose efforts to paint Biden as some kind of socialist radical are as tired as 2020 is long, but from Data for Progress co-founder Sean McElwee, Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchell, and former President Barack Obama. “I think a lot of people who just [crap] on the Democratic Party haven’t spent a lot of time talking to mainstream actors within the Democratic Party ecosystem,” McElwee said in The New Yorker observing the party as a whole was pretty liberal. “I think people should just take a step back and look at what Biden has done. A. O. C. is someone I like a lot. She said that she wouldn’t vote for him in the primary, and that in a different country she would be in a different party from him. And he could have responded to that by being, like, ‘[Screw] you.’ But instead he responded to that by being, like, ‘How about you come in and write my climate policy?’ ” “He’s recognizing that this might be a Rooseveltian moment,” Mitchell opined when asked about Biden’s rhetoric change from centrist to progressive.
