One of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s, R-Ky., favorite ways to frame Joe Biden’s presidency is that it’s a giant “bait and switch,” meaning Biden ran as a moderate but is governing as a radical leftist. The basic premise is false — pretty much everything Biden has done or tried to do as president was clearly articulated during his 2020 campaign.
Nevertheless, it’s true that the Joe Biden of 2021 is not the same as the Joe Biden of 1981 or 2001, or even the Joe Biden who was Barack Obama’s vice president.
But did he undergo some kind of dramatic change in perspective? Or have circumstances allowed Biden to finally live up to the principles he and other Democrats have been claiming to hold for decades?
On the surface, Biden’s evolution is obvious. Unlike at earlier stages of his career, he has stopped worrying about the deficit and promoted expansive government spending to solve both short- and long-term problems. Where before he was more tentative, now he is moving more boldly.
But what’s really driving this is a change in circumstances, not a real evolution in thinking. In a new Politico piece, White House advisers spelled out this argument in an interesting way, by arguing that his current values echo old ones, but applied to a new situation:
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“Those close to Biden define ‘Bidenomics’ as a laser-like focus on the needs of workers, based on the idea that a fairer tax system and strong unions will bolster the working and middle class and close the income inequality gap. To prove the consistency to these core values, the White House pointed to different votes Biden cast over his decades-long career in support of unions, bargaining rights, increased pay and expansions of child and caregiver tax credits.”
There’s nothing in there that’s inaccurate. But there are two ways to interpret it. One is that for decades — Biden arrived in the Senate in 1973 — he and other Democrats were doing an imperfect job putting their ideals into practice. If the more liberal Biden we see now is what he does when he finally has the power to set the agenda, then in his more moderate past he must have been constantly trimming his sails.
The other interpretation — the more generous one — is that he did everything he could given his position and the circumstances of the moment. Very few elected officials pursue every policy impulse they have; politics is complicated, and everyone has to compromise much of the time.
Biden, furthermore, has long built his political identity on pragmatism and deal-making; he never said that from his perch in the Senate he’d lead the whole country in a new direction, but that he’d deliver for the folks back home and advocate for a reasonably liberal set of ideals.
Even now, Biden would argue that he’s basically sticking to this approach. The key difference is that as president he has the ability to push further on those same ideals. You can even make the case that he is not pushing much further than before, but his movements are more visible because he can set the agenda.
After all, the truth is that the current agenda he’s setting isn’t all that radical. It’s a few steps to the left of where Obama was, and more ambitious than what Biden advocated for as a senator, but nothing in it expresses any different values from the ones Democrats have long held. He doesn’t want to seize the means of production and throw every billionaire into a reeducation camp; he just wants to beef up union protections and bump up the top tax rate by a few points.
The Republican claim that Biden is a secret leftist tells us only that they, too, have the same basic ideals they’ve long had. They’ll surely be passionately opposed to the administration’s new plan to invigorate IRS enforcement, for instance, which could bring in hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue.
They like the IRS in its current form — hobbled, overworked and outgunned by the superwealthy’s armies of lawyers and accountants — perfectly well (Republicans are happy to defund the police, as long as it’s the tax police). But that doesn’t make the administration’s plan radical. And in the big picture, given the circumstances — particularly the way the debate around deficits has changed — what Biden is doing is probably not different from what pretty much any Democrat would have done in his place.
During their first debate in 2020, then-President Donald Trump said accusingly of Biden, “Your party wants to go socialist medicine.” Biden responded, “I am the Democratic Party right now. The platform of the Democratic Party is what I, in fact, approved of.”
His point was that whether there are radicals in the party, he wasn’t one of them, and he was the one in charge. He was right then, and no matter what the opposition says, it’s still true.
Paul Waldman writes for The Washington Post.