Super Tuesday, which vaulted former Vice President Joe Biden ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders, looks like a victory for the Democratic Party's moderate forces.
Both Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who had cast themselves as moderate alternatives to Sanders, ended their campaigns and endorsed Biden.
Biden surged in national polling, and Democratic voters largely ignored former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who spent hundreds of millions of his personal dollars attempting to portray himself as the candidate of moderate consensus.
There is a problem with this view: Biden is a moderate compared to Sanders, but he is notably to the left of previous Democratic standard-bearers.
To describe Biden as a moderate without this context is to ignore the specifics of his agenda and the leftward shift in Democratic Party politics it represents.
To some extent, this just makes Joe Biden a Democrat in 2020, a successor to President Obama whose approach to policy could be summed up as, "Obama, but more."
Biden, arguably more than any other contemporary American politician, has long embodied the Democratic establishment consensus, from its tough-on-crime days in the 1990s to its wrong-about-Iraq days in the early 2000s to its technocratic economic policy gambles under Obama, when Biden played pivotal roles in the stimulus, the auto bailout, and high-stakes congressional budget deals.
https://reason.com/2020/03/04/joe-biden-is-no-moderate/
Both Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who had cast themselves as moderate alternatives to Sanders, ended their campaigns and endorsed Biden.
Biden surged in national polling, and Democratic voters largely ignored former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who spent hundreds of millions of his personal dollars attempting to portray himself as the candidate of moderate consensus.
There is a problem with this view: Biden is a moderate compared to Sanders, but he is notably to the left of previous Democratic standard-bearers.
To describe Biden as a moderate without this context is to ignore the specifics of his agenda and the leftward shift in Democratic Party politics it represents.
To some extent, this just makes Joe Biden a Democrat in 2020, a successor to President Obama whose approach to policy could be summed up as, "Obama, but more."
Biden, arguably more than any other contemporary American politician, has long embodied the Democratic establishment consensus, from its tough-on-crime days in the 1990s to its wrong-about-Iraq days in the early 2000s to its technocratic economic policy gambles under Obama, when Biden played pivotal roles in the stimulus, the auto bailout, and high-stakes congressional budget deals.
https://reason.com/2020/03/04/joe-biden-is-no-moderate/
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