Elizabeth Warren Knows What Joe Biden Needs in a Vice President

If Biden wants to win the White House and govern like a New Dealer, Warren is his indispensable partner.

By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times, 05/13/20

Opinion Columnist

• May 13, 2020

Senator Elizabeth Warren at a town hall at the armory in Seattle in February.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Joe Biden built his political career as the New Deal order came to an end, one of a generation of Democrats who sought to reconcile the Democratic Party to the Reagan revolution by placing distance between the party and the racial and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. His was a politics attuned to the worries and fears of suburban white voters, from busing and crime to guns and drugs. 

Now, of course, those politics are outdated. The Democratic Party has, in the decades since Biden first won office in 1972, come to rely on the groups that fueled those upheavals. The insurgents are the establishment, and Biden — after eight years as vice president to a man who embodied the liberal, cosmopolitan shift in the Democratic Party — has reconciled himself to the new reality. He is still a centrist, but that center is well to the left of where it was even a decade ago. 

The coronavirus pandemic and ensuing economic crisis have done even more to enlarge the scope of possibility, and Biden, always attuned to changing political winds, has adjusted himself accordingly. Instead of an Obama restoration, Gabriel Debenetti writes in New York magazine, the former vice president is planning a New Deal-esque effort to save American society.

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From the The New York Times, 05/13/20