Sen. Bernie Sanders revealed on Wednesday that Joe Biden told him he saw an opportunity to be “the most progressive president” since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“The reason I say that I think Biden has a chance to be the most progressive president since FDR, is that that is exactly what Joe Biden has said to me,” Sanders, a Vermont Independent and democratic socialist, told CNN.
- “He understands the severity of this moment, Sanders averred, before listing what he said were crises in America, including the coronavirus outbreak and climate change.
- “Half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck. That was before the pandemic. Over half a million people in America are homeless. Eighty-seven million people are uninsured or underinsured,” he continued.
- “It is a major economic crisis and, I think that Joe understands that and will do his best to address it.”
Comrades in arms: Sanders’ high hopes for Biden appeared to reflect his own influence on the presumptive Democratic nominee’s agenda.
- The senator’s allies worked with Biden’s team in task forces to develop a recently unveiled slate of left-wing policies for the campaign.
- The joint policy wish list included expanded government health insurance, a government jobs program and the end of Trump-era immigration enforcement.
In an interview with NPR on July 8 Sanders said, “The goals of the task forces were to move the Biden campaign into as progressive a direction as possible, and I think we did that. On issue after issue, whether it was education, the economy, health care, climate, immigration, criminal justice, I think there was significant movement on the part of the Biden campaign.”
- Sanders told MSNBC the same day: “I think the compromise that they came up with, if implemented, will make Biden the most progressive president since FDR.”
The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that another prominent progressive, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, has also emerged as a close economic adviser to Biden.
- Warren, who like Sanders lost to Biden in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, has reportedly made the short list of vice presidential candidates.
Biden, too, after running a relatively moderate primary campaign that failed to generate much enthusiasm, has lately spoken of the pandemic as an opportunity to be a transformational president.
- In a July 13 phone call with reporters, Biden said he would be comfortable pushing a more ambitious agenda than his former boss, President Barack Obama, and compared himself to Roosevelt, a progressive icon who massively expanded the federal government with his sweeping New Deal domestic agenda.
- “I do think we’ve reached a point, a real inflection in American history. And I don’t believe it’s unlike what Roosevelt was met with,” Biden said. “I think we have an opportunity to make some really systemic change.”
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has repeatedly warned that a Biden presidency would effectively be a Trojan horse for left-wing radicalism.
Trump’s new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said in his first public statement last week: “We will expose Joe Biden as a hapless tool of the extreme left and contrast his failures with the undeniable successes of President Trump.”
