When 78-year-old Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) threw in the towel for his presidential bid April 8, the youthful 77-year-old Democrat front-runner former Vice President Joe Biden (D-Del.) licked his chops, hoping to capture Bernie’s loyal following. While there’s great enthusiasm to beat 73-year-old President Donald Trump, the progressive agenda, led by Bernie and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), has now seeped into Biden’s middle-of-the-road campaign. Biden appealed to Democrats primarily because voters believed he has the best shot of beating Trump in November, but, mainly because he’s a mainstream Democrat, not, as Sanders, part of the progressive-fringe promoting things like Medicare-for-All, free college tuition, student debt forgiveness and the Green New Deal. Biden wants Bernie’s progressive following but isn’t comfortable with much of the left-wing agenda.
No matter how much Joe tries to bend to get the progressive vote, he’s not comfortable with policy positions that take him out of his wheelhouse. Biden after-all has been a war hawk for much of his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, agreeing largely with the foreign policy of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who never met a war he didn’t like. Biden was not among the Senate’s biggest anti-war protesters during the Vietnam War. Joe backed most of the mini-wars or U.S. military interventions since the Vietnam War. He lent support to former President Ronald Reagan in his military interventions on Grenada, Panama and Nicaragua. Biden supported former President George W. Bush’s Afghan and Iraq Wars, where the U.S. spent over $2.4 trillion, not including funding to keep al Qaeda, Islamic State and Taliban from toppling the Kabul and Baghdad governments
Biden’s has a lot of explaining to do for backing the eight-year old Saudi-U.S.-Turkey proxy war against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Like McCain, Biden and his boss, former President Barack Obama, spent lavishly on various Syrian rebel groups, all failed to topple al-Assad, killing 350,000 and driving 12 million more into homelessness, creating the worst humanitarian crisis since WW II. Biden wholeheartedly backed the war to topple al-Assad, once agreeing with former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to set up no-fly zones to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from defending al-Assad. Progressives, like Sanders, oppose all foreign interventions, something they’ll have a difficult time reconciling with Joe. Joe backed toppling Libya’s Col. Muammar Gaddafi, letting the once oil-rich country to fall to Islamic terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Joe’s problems for progressives can’t be easily resolved by his latest proposal to drop the Medicare age to 60, something that won’t happen anytime soon. Saying he’d forgive some student debt won’t cut it with Bernie’s hardcore supporters that want more not less for progressive causes. Biden’s tilt to progressives, while tactical, won’t last long unless he actually adopts Bernie’s policy proposals into the Democrat Party Platform. When he does, he’ll capture more of Bernie’s votes but will lose independents looking for a moderate to run the White House. Biden finds himself pandering to progressive groups, not knowing that he could very well drive independents and potentially cross-over Republicans away. Polls show the Republican Party strongly backs Trump by over 90%, making Biden’s path to Obama’s grand coalition all the more difficult.
Progressive groups haven’t given up on the Green New Deal something they’re planning on pushing to Biden. “The Biden campaign really did the least outreach of any of the major front-runners to Sunrise Movement throughout the election cycle,” said Evan Weber, one of the co-founders of the youth-led climate organization. Youth groups like the Sunrise Movement are 100% committed to Greta Thunberg’s global youth climate change movement. Affiliating with Thunberg would buy Joe youth votes but would drive independent voters away from his campaign. So far, Joe’s message to various groups is let’s get on the same page to beat Trump. While that works for some, it’s not enough for progressive groups looking for the Democrat standard bearer to adopt more progressive policies into his platform. Praising Bernie isn’t enough to get progressives to back Joe.
Progressives demand that Joe does more than “let’s beat Trump” in November. Unless Joe’s willing to push Medicare for All, Climate Change, free college tuition, immigration reform, raising minimum wage, criminal justice reform and student debt forgiveness, it’s going to be difficult to get Bernie’s hardcore backers to join the Biden bandwagon. Biden’s appeal of “let’s get back back to normal,” isn’t enough to mobilize the youth vote. Unlike when former President Barack Obama ran in 2008 as a 46-year-old candidate, Biden’s the oldest person to run for president in U.S. history at 77-years-old. Demonizing Trump won’t be enough to motivate Obama’s old coalition that brought independents and moderate Republicans into the fold. Whatever Joe does to placate Bernie’s backers, it won’t be enough. To win in November, he’ll have to be himself, something anything but progressive.
