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Biden is happily inheriting a party that has moved to the left, without interruption, since he left the vice presidency. The report this week from his Unity Task Force, the product of a deal between the nominee and primary runner-up Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., found Biden's team inching a little further in that direction - cautious, careful with its wording, but dramatically different from the politics that defined much of Biden's career.
"I think the compromise that they came up with, if implemented, will make Biden the most progressive president since FDR," Sanders said in a Wednesday night interview with MSNBC's Chris Hayes.
Republicans quickly repurposed Sanders's answer to describe Biden as a catspaw for the country's resurgent socialist movements. "This is surrendering to the socialists," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a Thursday interview on Fox News. The Republican National Committee highlighted sentences taken directly from some of Sanders's campaign white papers to accuse Biden of "plagiarism," a charge that evoked his botched 1988 presidential campaign, if not quite describing a task force designed to merge platforms.
But the basic Republican critique was right. Biden, seen by voters as the most moderate of their two dozen or so options in the primary, has welcomed a shift away from the careful politics Democrats deployed, for decades, to mollify suburban voters. Under his proposals, millions of voters are offered a new government health-care plan, and millions more are offered federal housing and housing assistance. Tax cuts, emphasized for years to convince swing voters, aren't prioritized.
"In 2008, one of the things we had to constantly fight in places like the I-4 corridor was taxes," said Steve Schale, an Obama-Biden campaign veteran who's now a strategist for the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country, referring to a vote-rich stretch of Florida cities and suburbs. "I bet you we ran more ads about Barack Obama cutting middle-class taxes than anything. We had to win that fight. Our ad strategy was built around keeping that fight neutral."
Tough-on-crime politicking has been de-emphasized, too. The party's 2012 platform did not mention the "war on drugs." The 2016 platform, reshaped by Sanders delegates, condemned the drug war for the "imprisonment of millions of Americans, disproportionately people of color." The task force's paper, with Biden's name at the top, pledges to "end the failed 'War on Drugs' " entirely.
That's still less than Sanders and his allies wanted, and skepticism of the task force, from the beginning, assumed that Biden would invite the left inside his tent to make it less relevant but not deliver. The task force does not recommend a right to strike for public workers, a right that the left wants but that is not favored by leadership of the biggest public-sector union. It recommends the legalization of medical marijuana but not the full legalization now favored by most voters. And criminal justice reform advocates noticed that the task force recommended only that qualified immunity, which protects police from lawsuits, be "reined in," not ended.
Even so, that's more than Biden needed to offer to the left and Sanders supporters, and more than most defeated candidates have gotten. While Sanders won just 29 percent of pledged delegates throughout the primaries, he appointed 40 percent of the task force, giving him more influence on a high-profile set of recommendations that will shape the party's platform than he was going to get on the platform itself. While Sanders's path was vanishing by early April, his decision to drop out gave Biden three months as the de facto nominee, instead of the drawn-out contest feared by Democrats. And polling by the New York Times and Siena has found just a handful of Sanders supporters, and no Warren supporters, frustrated enough by the primary to consider backing President Donald Trump.
Sanders's interest in the platform of a party he does not belong to has been one of the senator's great contradictions. In primary mode, he has excoriated the party's "establishment." When the 2016 and 2020 primaries were over, he focused intensely on changing the party's official positioning, even though nothing binds a party to govern on its platform.
The secrecy of the task forces prevented the sort of messy, televised fight that Democrats went through in 2016, when Sanders supporters in an Orlando, Fla., hotel ballroom shouted "shame!" if a Sanders plank was voted down. It has given the left a tool to use in whatever form these platform discussions take.
While Medicare-for-all proponents made up a majority of the health-care task force, they did not try to put Biden on record for a policy he famously considers unworkable. They did successfully urge a major revision to his health-care plan, calling for poor people not eligible for Medicaid to be "automatically enrolled" in a public health-care option - a change from Biden's proposal that new enrollees join through interactions with other government programs.
None of this made it into Biden's economic speech near Scranton, Pa., the centerpiece of a days-long policy rollout that was delayed by a month of civil rights protests. That speech emphasized a "buy American" proposal adopted in part from Elizabeth Warren's, D-Mass., campaign, to the consternation of some Trump allies, who wanted the president to move first on a similar policy.
But the Republican response to the task force didn't spend much time on the details, either. It has become a frequent feature of this campaign: The Trump campaign incorrectly assigned a far-left position to Biden, making a position that he holds, one that's merely much further left than the Obama-Biden platform, sound more moderate. The task force's climate plan, shaped in part by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., moved Biden's date for a renewable energy economy up by 15 years. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, accuses Biden of wanting to "ban fossil fuel energy" entirely, based on a garbled Biden comment about ending fossil fuel subsidies.
While they criticized the "socialism" of the task force plan, conservatives did not spend much time picking through it. "Now we know what he meant when he said to transform America," Fox News host Sean Hannity told viewers Wednesday night, referring to use of the word "transform" in a Biden tweet last week.
After arguing that Democrats would seize "the means of production," and after mocking a short clip of Biden tangled up in a sentence, Hannity focused instead on comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, then brought on the president's first son to discuss whether "Joe Biden knows where he is," moving past the details of what he would run on.
Biden has shown a willingness to embrace many of the left's priorities. It's unclear what parts of that his opponents will choose to notice.
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