During the Democratic primary, entrepreneur Andrew Yang built a bit of a reputation as an interesting, blunt voice on American politics. So it is perhaps not surprising that Yang, on the last night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, had the sharpest analysis of what makes Joe Biden an effective candidate in this year’s cycle.
“The magic of Joe Biden is that everything he does becomes the new ridiculous,” Yang said during a roundtable discussion among former candidates in 2020. “When he comes up with an ambitious template to tackle climate change, it will suddenly be everyone’s follow song. “
During the Democratic primary, Biden was often described as the moderate measure in the field. But when you look above political labels at the flesh of the policies Biden proposes, his agenda is shockingly ambitious.
He proposes a major expansion of government health care that includes a public option and has driven a climate plan that would decarbonize the U.S. economy by 2035. Waleed Shahid, the communications director for Justice Democrats, told Vox that Biden’s policy slate “is the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in the party’s modern history.”
President Trump has tried to run with this, claiming that Biden is a “Trojan horse” for left-wing people like screenwriter Bernie Sanders and rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But polls show that voters see Biden as more moderate than Trump himself.
“It’s an argument that founders since Americans just saw Biden win an extensive primary campaign, in which he was arrested several times for failing to pass various progressive litmus tests,” writes my colleague Matt Yglesias. “Biden won the primary handily by convincingly hitting a moderate label on a policy agenda that is nonetheless much braver than the one pursued by Barack Obama as proposed by Hillary Clinton in 2016.”
This is what Yang points out. Biden proposes an incredibly progressive policy agenda and a massive government mobilization to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
But he still seems like the safe choice, as opposed to Trumpian chaos, because he’s a familiar face with a moderate reputation – earned, in part, by modern Senate votes earlier in his career.
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