US President Joe Biden doesn’t understand this truth. He’s trying to attract votes from working class people next year by marketing himself as some sort of Bernie Sanders-style warrior for progressive policies. This is even though he didn’t lift a finger to turn any of those ideas into actual law—and then only after yielding to pressure from his party’s left flank.
Sanders’ three main proposals—increasing the federal minimum wage to $15, Medicare For All and student loan forgiveness—were so popular among Democratic voters that most of his 2020 presidential primary rivals, including Biden, signed on to some or all of them.
Biden was never enthusiastic about progressive proposals. If Medicare For All passed both houses of Congress, Biden threatened during the primaries that he would veto it. He’s still against allowing all Americans to see a doctor.
Biden is, however, for adding a “public option” to the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare.
Problem is, he’s not willing to spend political capital on it. No speeches, no town halls, no forcing a vote on legislation so that congressional Republicans have to go on the record as being against it.
Going through the motions? That, he has covered.
I don’t know if Biden plans a major campaign push on health care. But he certainly does on student loan forgiveness, an issue dear to the younger voters who were a key component of his 2020 coalition. “This is a tremendous opportunity for Democrats to course-correct from identity-based issues,” Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira observed after the Supreme Court ruled the president doesn’t have the authority to single-handedly forgive billions of dollars in student debt, as Biden lamely tried to do.
Pivoting to the politics of pantomime, Biden attacked the GOP over the court decision.
“These Republican officials just couldn’t bear the thought of providing relief for working-class, middle-class Americans,” Biden said. “The hypocrisy of Republican elected officials is stunning.”
Takes one to know one.
Trouble for Biden is, college borrowers have known since the beginning that his executive order plan was doomed in the courts, that he cynically ginned it up as a placeholder to seduce naive younger voters during the 2022 midterms, that he was never there for them in the first place, which is why his effort had all the hallmarks of a dutiful feint, a bare minimum necessary to get progressives off his back.
As a senator from the bank-owned state of Delaware, Biden was a mortal enemy of those enslaved by educational usury and a key backer of the 2005 bill that now makes it impossible to discharge student debt in bankruptcy, no matter how poor or broke you are. In 2021, he wrongly characterized college debtors as graduates of elite institutions—in fact, most went to state schools—and ridiculed the “idea that I say to a community, 'I'm going to forgive the debt, the billions of dollars of debt, for people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn.'"
Everyone knows that Biden is the Chicago Black Sox of the student loan debate, determined to throw the game to the banks that comprised his donor base.
It’s the same story with the federal minimum wage. Biden didn’t really want to do anything; he only endorsed an increase to $15 in order to pacify progressives during the 2020 primaries. As with health care and student loans, Democrats blamed their inability to get legislation through the split Senate, where you need 60 votes to get most bills passed, for their refusal to put a living wage up for a vote.
Despite Democrats’ lame excuses, there are ways for a determined president to get his way. Democrats could refuse to raise the debt limit or to fund the military unless Republicans gave them what they wanted. They could threaten to target vulnerable Republicans in purple districts with attack ads that portray them as hating young people, minimum wage workers and the sick.
Hardball tactics could also be deployed to legalize abortion at the federal level.
Biden Democrats will do no such thing, of course. Just last week, Biden reminded us he’s “not big on abortion.” As corporatist conservatives, they have always been opposed to progressive platform planks like socialized health care, raising wages, abortion rights and student loan forgiveness. They’ll pay lip service to the left. But they’ll never go to war for it.
The question is: who do they think they’re fooling?
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)