Can Biden’s Center Hold?

Evan Osnos: “Republicans have long accused Democrats of plotting to smuggle socialism into the United States. But leveling that charge against Biden, whose career has been distinguished mostly by careful centrism, is an awkward task. Biden entered the Democratic primaries with a narrow goal: to end the Trump Presidency. Most Americans, he argued, did not want a revolution. At an early fund-raiser in New York, he promised not to ‘demonize’ the rich and said that ‘nothing would fundamentally change.'”

“But, by the time Biden effectively clinched the nomination, in March, he had begun to describe his candidacy as a bid for systemic change on the scale of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. According to a senior aide to Bernie Sanders, Biden told Sanders, in a phone call about a possible endorsement, ‘I want to be the most progressive President since F.D.R.’ That evolution has confounded critics on all sides.”