John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist argues that the last major candidate to drop out of the Democratic presidential primary race actually won the contest.
Sanders might have lost the battle for the Democratic nomination to Biden, but he won the war for the future of the Democratic Party. Since his insurgent challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and especially over the past year of campaigning, Sanders and his allies on the left have transformed the Democratic Party almost beyond recognition from what it was when Biden last served in elected office as Barack Obama’s vice president.
There’s no better evidence of this transformation than Biden himself. Once considered a moderate, Biden has gradually embraced almost every aspect of Sanders’s left-wing populist agenda—a $15-an-hour minimum wage, free college, tax hikes for the rich, and more power to workers. Just about the only Sanders idea he hasn’t endorsed is Medicare for All, but that one might well be around the corner.
Perhaps most telling was Biden’s embrace of the Green New Deal last summer, an obvious sop to the sensibilities of Sanders surrogates like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, who have made it pretty clear that the Green New Deal isn’t really about climate change but re-ordering the economy along socialist lines.
Biden has pitched himself as a return to normalcy, as if 2016 and Trump had never happened, and we can just go back to those halcyon days of Obama, when all was good and right in Washington.
But eliminating the use of fossil fuels is not a return to normalcy. In fact, Biden supports a slew of policies that Obama never did—policies that bear the indelible mark of Sanders-style socialism. …
… The truth is that a Biden presidency would be anything but normal. At this point, it’s not too much to say that Biden will be the farthest-left Democrat ever nominated for president.
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