Before Joe Biden ascended to the presidency, he was widely known for his more moderate brand of politics within the Democratic Party.
Throughout Biden’s 36-year career in the Senate, he was seen as the consummate dealmaker and held a reservoir of trust among top leaders as a chair of the Foreign Relations and Judiciary committees.
When Barack Obama tapped Biden to serve as his vice-presidential running mate in 2008, a big part of the then-Delaware senator’s appeal was his record of bipartisanship in Congress.
So many observers were surprised when Biden embraced more progressive policy positions after taking the Oval Office in 2021. He supported rigorous environmental protections, canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, and expanded clean energy tax credits.
According to Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Biden — who ran against the more liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries — felt that progressives played a critical role in his successful election as president that year.
And Biden felt that they needed needed to be included in his coalition as he worked with Congress to enact legislative priorities.
“When he became president, he felt compelled to govern with them being a part of it,” Murphy told The New York Times Magazine of Biden’s feelings toward progressives. “And Joe Biden’s a loyal guy.”
“I also think Biden went through this metamorphosis. He went from being a neoliberal to being an economic nationalist,” the Connecticut Democrat added. “He came to the conclusion that the markets were fundamentally broken, that power was too concentrated and workers were disempowered.”
Once in the White House, Biden — long an ardent supporter of organized labor — became the first sitting US president to join a picket line. And the president backed a bold social-spending plan known as the Build Back Better agenda, which was felled due to opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. (Manchin went on to play a key role in crafting the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed Congress in 2022 and was signed into law by Biden.)
More recently, some of the highest-profile progressives in Congress — including Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York — rushed to Biden’s defense when several Democratic lawmakers called on him to exit the presidential race. Biden for weeks said he would remain as the party’s nominee, but after mounting speculation, he left the race in July and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him.
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