But since the voters had their say, party leaders seem to be systematically ignoring the message. After vanquishing Sanders, former vice president Joe Biden has moved rapidly toward Sandernista positions on the environment, health care, financial regulation, and many other issues.
Perhaps Democrat bosses are revealing their true beliefs, or maybe it’s just a panicked response to the usual lack of enthusiasm for Biden. Despite strong polling, Biden doesn’t have an enthusiastic following. Kevin Roose reported in the New York Times in April: “Joe Biden is very famous, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at his YouTube channel.…
“… [T]he virtual crickets that greet many of his appearances have become a source of worry for some Democrats, who see his sluggish performance online as a bad omen for his electoral chances in November.
“ ‘This video is 2 days old and it’s sitting at 20,000 views,’ one commenter wrote under a recent video of Mr. Biden’s. ‘This is a guy that is supposed to beat Trump?’ ”
A Biden campaign podcast called “Here’s the Deal” was a springtime flop.2
Biden’s sharp left turn on policy may help him secure some enthusiastic young Sanders voters. But since there were demonstrably more Biden voters than Sanders voters, one wonders how many aging non-radicals will come along for the leftward ride in November. After defeating Sanders, Biden decided to start taking the socialist senator’s advice and giving him a say in the Biden agenda, and adopting many of his policies.
In the summer, they set about crafting ideas to appeal to party radicals. In Forbes, Sally Pipes described the new groups created to draft policies as “a who’s who of the progressive elite—and signal that Biden is going to run for the White House on a platform that is further to the left than any Democrat in history.
“His healthcare task force is a haven for advocates of a government takeover of health insurance.…
“The highest-wattage name on Biden’s climate change task force is New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has made the Green New Deal her signature legislative proposal.”3
In 2019 the Green New Deal and its potential $100 trillion price tag received not a single vote in the U.S. Senate even though a number of senators, including vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, had served as cosponsors. But its radical author is helping to craft the Biden plan for governing. In the summer of 2020 Ocasio-Cortez and her radical colleagues joined with Team Biden to publish a long document entitled, Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations.4
The 110-page Biden-Sanders coproduction essentially calls for the political revolution long promised by Bernie Sanders. It says that “Democrats commit to forging a new social and economic contract with the American people.”5 Just like the Sanders campaign—and just like Venezuela’s socialist constitution6—the new Biden plan recognizes things like housing and health care as rights guaranteed by government. The plan promises higher wages and affordable financial services. The “new social and economic contract” will also provide policies to address America’s alleged history of “economic exclusion and political suppression.”7
The plan makes clear that the goal is to grow the public sector, not the private economy: “We will invest in the caring workforce, including by directing significant funding to state and local governments to retain and hire more teachers, public health professionals, nurses, home care workers, social workers, and other critical positions. Democrats reject any efforts to privatize public-sector jobs, from our schools to the United States Postal Service.”8
There’s so much more, from Medicaid expansion to a new government-run health plan to free public college and university tuition for most students to applying ancient telephone regulation to the internet to a new Office of Environmental Justice to prosecute business.
“We will set a bold, national goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for all new buildings by 2030, on the pathway to creating a 100 percent clean building sector,” proclaims the Biden-Sanders plan. “… Democrats will move quickly to reestablish strong standards for clean cars and trucks that consider the most recent advances in technology, and accelerate the adoption of zero-emission vehicles in the United States while reclaiming market share for domestically produced vehicles.
“We will reduce harmful air pollution and protect our children’s health by transitioning the entire fleet of 500,000 school buses to American-made, zero-emission alternatives within five years. We will lead by example in the public sector by transitioning the 3 million vehicles in the federal, state, and local fleets to zero-emission vehicles.”9
“Environmental regulation is shaping up as a defining issue in the presidential race, with President Trump doubling down on his bid to ratchet back government oversight and former Vice President Joe Biden promising to reverse Mr. Trump’s regulatory rollbacks,”10 note Alex Leary and Timothy Puko in the Wall Street Journal. In July the presidential campaign rivals “outlined diametrically opposed views. Mr. Trump ordered a streamlining of environmental reviews and said he would keep shrinking the reach of government to help business. Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, released a $2 trillion clean-energy plan he said would spur job growth through investments in new technology.… Mr. Trump also took a swipe at Mr. Biden’s proposals. ‘The American people know best how to run their own lives,’ Mr. Trump said. ‘They don’t need Washington bureaucrats controlling their every move and micromanaging their every decision.’… Mr. Biden promised ‘historic investments,’ invoking language Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders used during the primaries. Since Mr. Sanders dropped out, Mr. Biden has engaged progressive groups that once had been harsh critics, and his proposals… drew rave reviews from them.”
The Journal report added: “When Mr. Trump came to power in 2017, he and congressional Republicans undid more than a dozen major Obama-era regulations that had yet to take effect, using the Congressional Review Act.… The president also has used executive orders during the pandemic to trim or suspend other regulations, allowing truckers to be on the road longer hours and scaling back restrictions on telehealth.”11
Former vice president Biden has indeed been winning
