Joe Biden Is Scared
Joe Biden has caught a ton of flak, with no shortage of it from yours truly, for being something of a relic of yesterday’s Democratic Party. Today, McClatchy asked Biden’s detractors to the left: Have you considered his Plans?
McClatchy took a hard look at Biden’s stated agenda if he were to become president, and came to the conclusion that not only are Biden’s plans more progressive than his two previous campaigns for president, but they’re more ambitious than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Per McClatchy, just a few of the areas where Biden 2020 is more ambitious than Clinton 2016:
On health care, Clinton proposed offering a public insurance plan for Americans enrolled in the health care exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. She also wanted to let adults older than 55 buy into Medicare.
Biden’s plan goes much further: He wants to allow all Americans — including those receiving insurance through their employer — to buy into a government-backed insurance plan, a shift some progressives have said would represent an enormous change to Obamacare. (Biden also proposed significantly increasing the subsidies available to those who enroll in the public option.)
There’s also a wide disparity between Biden and Clinton’s climate change plans. Clinton proposed spending $60 billion on clean-energy fund as part of an attempt to make the U.S. 80% carbon-free by 2050; Biden wants to spend $1.7 trillion in federal money to make the country emit a net of zero carbon emissions by 2050.
That climate change plan earned a minor endorsement from an unlikely source. “Joe Biden’s climate plan—I’m going to get canceled for this—is quite ambitious,” Data for Progress founder Sean McElwee told McClatchy. (McElwee also told McClatchy that such an ambitious plan would go exactly nowhere if Biden didn’t push for a number of structural reforms, like making Puerto Rico a state and packing the Supreme Court.)
If you’re on the left and view electoral politics as a way to enact some degree of social change, there are two ways to view this. One is the optimistic view, which is that the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has moved so far to the left since Bernie Sanders’ run in 2016 that it’s pulled not just other progressives (Elizabeth Warren) and mainstream liberals (Kamala Harris) along with it, but Joe Biden—the current frontrunner, and the portrait of American centrism for the past half-century—to the left as well.