The Sad Tale of Moderate Joe Biden

He blew it.

Cast your mind back to the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. It was then that Joe Biden emerged as the “Great Moderate Hope.” Recall that by the time the first Democratic presidential primary debates were held in late June 2019, leading candidates were seeking to outflank one another to the left. The thinking was that a Democratic electorate radicalized by the Trump presidency would respond favorably to maximally progressive positions.

Many of these candidates endorsed a wide range of radical policy options: “Medicare for All” reforms that would eliminate private health insurance; a Green New Deal with an aggressive timeline for reducing reliance on fossil fuels; banning fracking; decriminalizing unauthorized migration over the Mexican border; providing health insurance to illegal immigrants; allowing prisoners to vote; abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and promising reparations to the descendants of slaves.

Joe Biden, by and large, did not participate in this race to the left. Instead, he took advantage of both his primary opponents’ radical ideas and the chaos of Trump’s governance by striking a moderate note, promising to pursue progressive but sensible policies, restore the “soul of America,” provide the help Americans needed to get through the crisis, and, of course and above all, beat Donald Trump. This was a congenial message to the Democratic primary electorate, starting with black voters in South Carolina on February 29 and running through every demographic on Super Tuesday and beyond. It turned out that, despite the strenuous appeals of many candidates to the party’s rising left, most Democratic primary voters had more pragmatic and moderate views than the media-anointed advocates for a more radical party. Other candidates’ failure to understand this emptied the field for Biden, who cruised to the nomination after Super Tuesday.

Then a funny thing happened which was a “tell” on whether Biden intended to govern—as opposed to run—as a moderate. Usually, candidates attempt to move toward the center in preparation for a general-election campaign. But Biden did the reverse. He formed six “unity task forces” jointly coordinated by Biden and Bernie Sanders campaign figures, covering climate change, criminal-justice reform, the economy, education, health care, and immigration. The co-chairs included such lions of the left as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal, then-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and the task forces themselves were well stocked with Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren) supporters. The task forces produced a blizzard of positions and language considerably to the left of the “moderate, normie” politics upon which Biden had built his successful campaign. And these positions and language found their way into the Democratic Party platform, were incorporated into Biden’s campaign promises and, importantly, determined how the Biden administration made staffing and policy decisions. Despite Biden and his team’s initial insistence that the strenuous leftism found on Twitter wasn’t real life, by the end of the campaign they seemed to be quite happy to act as though it was.

Sure enough, once the Biden administration was up and running, moderation was conspicuous by its absence. First, there were the executive orders that, among other things, dramatically loosened the rules for dealing with illegal immigrants (pleasing progressive immigration advocacy groups), cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline and paused oil and gas leasing on Federal lands (pleasing progressive climate groups) and instituted a sweeping, government-wide effort to promote “equity” (pleasing the congeries of progressive identity-focused groups). He also signaled his support for transgender activists by appointing a transwoman, Rachel “gender-affirming care is settled science” Levine, as Assistant Secretary for Health and de facto administration spokesperson on transgender issues. And Biden repeatedly referred to transgender equality as “the civil rights issue of our time.”

None of this suggested a moderate approach targeted to the bulk of voters who had put him in office but rather one focused on pleasing the progressive wing of his party. The ordinary voters that supported Biden had bought the image of moderate “Scranton Joe” who would restore normality to the country after the stormy Trump years and the double whammy of a pandemic and subsequent economic crash. They were not really looking for a “transformational” president.

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Biden, however, did aspire to be one, not least in the economic realm where he pursued an amazingly aggressive agenda despite his narrow victory and thin congressional majorities. The first indicator of this was the American Rescue Plan (ARP). While there was a reasonable argument for a stimulus package of some size, Democrats, with Biden’s support, opted for a super-sized $1.9 trillion package that included $1,400 per person direct payments to households, an increased, fully-refundable child tax credit, $350 billion to state and local governments and much, much more. This was on top of well over $2 trillion in stimulus spending already passed at the end of the Trump administration. Larry Summers warned that a stimulus of the size pushed by Democrats had a high probability of spiking inflation.

And spike inflation it did. While some inflation was likely unavoidable due to supply-chain issues as the economy revved up, there seems little doubt that over-stimulating the economy made the inflation surge substantially worse than it would otherwise have been. As it happened, the inflation rate did indeed go up dramatically in the aftermath of the ARP eventually hitting 9 percent, a 40-year high, in mid-2022.

Adding to the evident lack of moderation, Biden, shortly after the ARP passed on a party-line vote, proposed the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, which together amounted to around $4 trillion (!) in additional spending on top of the ARP. These packages were supposed to complete Biden’s massive Build Back Better Plan, of which the ARP was only the first component. Unsurprisingly, this was a bit too much for Congress to swallow but a successful bipartisan deal, with a mere half trillion in new spending, was struck around infrastructure spending. However, voting on the bill was delayed for months because the House Progressive Caucus insisted the rest of Build Back Better must be rescued before the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) could actually be voted on.

Biden acceded to this delay, even as the inflation spike was gathering steam, going as far as to whip against bringing the IIJA to a House vote at one point. So, while the House engaged in arcane negotiations about the structure of a full Build Back Better bill, what programs it would and would not cover and how many trillions of dollars it all would cost, ordinary voters were trying to cope with the Delta wave of COVID and dealing with an ever-mounting cost of living. As a result, voters became increasingly unhappy with the Biden administration and increasingly unsure just when things would finally get back to the normalcy promised by candidate Biden.

The IIJA did eventually pass but the political damage to Biden’s moderate image was steadily accumulating. Concomitant with rising inflation, the situation at the southern border was deteriorating rapidly as wave after wave of illegal immigrants entered the country. As a New York Times reporter noted, explaining why so many migrants were attempting entry:

It is not just because they believe they will be able to make it across the 2,000 mile southern frontier. They are also certain that once they make it to the United States they will be able to stay.

Forever.

And by and large, they are not wrong.

The Biden administration initially dismissed the spike in border crossing as merely “seasonal” and furiously denounced those who termed the situation a crisis. This was not dissimilar to their insistence that rapidly rising inflation was “transitory” and nothing to worry about.

As it turned out, of course, the situation at the border really was a crisis and massive numbers of illegals were indeed overwhelming border controls and the immigration system more generally—not to mention the communities that wound up having to deal with sudden influxes of migrants. In the end, Biden administration policies generated an immigration surge, driven heavily by illegals, that was the largest in US history, surpassing even the immigration surges of the late 1800s and early 1900s. That’s pretty remarkable. But not moderate by any stretch of the imagination.

As illegal immigration was surging so was crime. Democrats became associated with a wave of progressive public prosecutors who seem quite hesitant about keeping criminals off the street, even as a spike in violent crimes like murders and carjacking swept the nation. This was twinned to a climate of tolerance and non-prosecution for lesser crimes that was degrading the quality of life in many cities under Democratic control.

Biden had little to say about all this. He couldn’t bring himself to echo former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s felicitous slogan: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. And he remained discreetly silent after San Francisco voters kicked out their ultra-progressive, soft-on-crime DA, Chesa Boudin, rather than cheering these voters on.

Biden did get around to mentioning crime in his 2023 SOTU speech but it was in the context of providing more “resources” and “investments” which would allegedly “prevent violence in the first place.” The police were mentioned but mostly in the context of police reform. The latter is surely a worthy cause but conspicuously missing was any mention of what moderate, normie voters wanted the most: getting violent criminals off the street and into jail. Indeed, the only mention of prosecuting criminals was about “prosecuting criminals who stole relief money meant to keep workers and small businesses afloat.” Fine idea, but that said nothing about the violent criminals who were making everyday life miserable in working-class communities throughout the country, especially in black and Latino areas.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration, even after the eventual passage of the IIJA, was not resting idle in its attempt to push the Build Back Better vision. In August, 2022, Biden shepherded two big bills to completion. One was the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, focusing on the semiconductor industry and scientific research, which was funded at the comparatively modest level of a quarter trillion dollars. The second was the unconvincingly-named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), whose fiscal cost, given its uncapped incentives, pushes a trillion dollars and possibly more according to some estimates.

The IRA, in reality, was a bill focused on climate change issues. It promoted and subsidized the renewables industry and electric vehicles, as the safety net provisions of the Build Back Better vision got kicked to the curb in deference to the priorities of Congressional progressives. But the priorities of ordinary voters are vastly different from these progressives, as poll after poll has documented. Climate change is actually not even a second-tier issue, but rather a third-tier issue, for ordinary voters, particularly working class voters. Putting such a big bet down on a third-tier issue did not exactly enhance Biden’s image as a moderate.

But that didn’t seem to bother Biden, even as his popularity was plummeting. Indeed, after the 2022 election, which turned out relatively well for the Democrats, Biden was asked what he planned to do differently in the final two years of his term. His reply: “nothing.” And he remained pretty much true to his word, with the belated exception of tightening up border security somewhat through executive order in mid-2024.

Thus, as Biden’s term limps to a close, there is little reason for voters to regard Biden as the “Great Moderate Hope” he had campaigned on. And they do not. He had an opportunity to restore faith in moderate, competent progressive governance but he blew it.

In a Third Way/Impact Research poll taken right before the 2022 election, voters rated Biden’s ideology as about 50 percent farther from their own ideology than they rated the Republicans in Congress. And in a Gallup poll taken right before Biden’s catastrophic June, 2024 debate with Trump, respondents saw Biden as the more ideologically extreme candidate—56 percent characterized him as “too liberal”, 12 points more than characterized Trump as “too conservative.”

Along the same lines, voters late in Biden’s term were more likely to see Biden as exceeding them in liberalism in a wide variety of specific areas than they were to see Trump as more conservative. They were also more likely to see Trump as close to their views. Here are some examples from a December, 2023 Blueprint Group/YouGov poll:

• On immigration, 56 percent of voters said Biden was more liberal than they were, compared to 46 percent who said Trump was more conservative. And by 44 to 25 percent they were more likely to say Trump was close to their views on the issue.

• Other issues had similar patterns. On crime, inflation and transgender issues, 51, 52, and 55 percent of voters respectively thought Biden was more liberal than they were. The corresponding numbers for Trump being more conservative were 45, 43, and 47 percent. Just 32, 33, and 29 percent respectively said Biden was “close to my views” on these issues, compared to 44, 44, and 39 percent for Trump.

One wonders how things would have turned out for Biden and his party, if Biden had not taken his fateful turn to the progressive left and their priorities. Perhaps the Democrats—and the country—would be in much better shape. We’ll never know.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is now a contributing writer.