CHARLES P. PIERCE: Joe Biden Is a Party Man. Right Now, That Means He's Veering Left.

[kpete]

He will do what needs to be done. Mainly, because he will have no choice, but partially as he is a party man.

The Democratic nominee's new climate proposal shows he knows where the party's energy is, and that the massive problems the country faces are interconnected.

The most significant thing about Biden’s plan, which emerged from the deliberations of a “unity commission” made up of supporters of the former vice president and those of Senator Bernie Sanders, is that it insists that the climate crisis and the economic crisis are inextricably bound to each other. His environmental plan also is a jobs plan also is a stimulus plan. He’s even proposed a revised version of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, this one dedicated to cleaning up abandoned energy plants and other environmental dead zones.

(This, if I recall correctly, was an idea that Inslee had.) He is not
sitting on a lead here. He’s throwing long."

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a33324511/joe-biden-climate-proposal-democratic-party-left/

[Phoenix61]

1. Smart people learn and grow and adapt.

I’ve always thought Joe was smart. That Barack calls him his best friend just backs that up because I can’t see Barack being best friends with someone stupid.

[LakeArenal]

2. Joe isn't veering left.

He’s an Establishment Democrat just like me. He never disagreed with the Sanders wing on what we need. Joe just thinks how to get there is different than Sanders.

[lagomorph777]

3. It's called Systems Engineering.

You can't pretend that all the pieces of our economy separate things. It just doesn't work like that.

[Progressive dog]

4. Joe is a party man,

which means he was and remains an establishment Democrat. Dealing with climate change does not require moving left for most Democrats, it just requires paying attention to the science.
If I remember correctly, the last Democratic president had something to do with the Paris Agreement on climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement

[Hekate]

5. Excellent read, as always w Pierce. Recommend the whole thing as an analytical piece...

The last two paragraphs:

The one thing to remember about Biden is that he’s a party man, deeply sensitive to the slightest tremor in Democratic tectonics. In the 1990s, when every prominent Democrat was whoring after corporate money and demonstrating how tough they could be on crime, Biden went with the program. Now, though, with all the real energy of the party flowing left, Biden is going with the flow because that’s what he believes the members of his party want him to do.

You can call that opportunistic if you want, but it puts him on record on things that his party’s base will expect him to do if and when he gets elected. He also appears to have a firm grasp on the intersection of all the various crises facing the country. Implicitly, Biden has evinced an understanding that incrementalism is an inadequate response to them. If he can channel his natural enthusiasm for politics into these big ideas, there’s nobody better at selling things within a political context than Joe Biden. I mean, he loves this stuff.

I mean, he loves this stuff