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Good article and reflects big change but seems the willingness to achieve a compromised consensus is getting lost.

To understand why Joe Biden has shifted left, look at the people working for him
Joel Wertheimer
This article is more than 4 months old


The president’s radical domestic plans have been shaped by a new generation of staffers moving through the West Wing


‘Joe Biden’s decisions, like those of any president, are heavily influenced by what the staffers who populate the White House tell him.’ Photograph: Melina Mara/AP

In president Joe Biden’s first address to Congress last week, he celebrated the $1.9tn relief plan that passed within the first days of his presidency and proposed an ambitious $4tn plan for family care, green infrastructure, education and jobs that Democrats might have been surprised to hear from even Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. To understand how Biden, the 78-year-old self-proclaimed moderate, came to push such an ambitious and progressive domestic policy agenda, you can start by looking at the young lanyard-wearing staffers who populate the West Wing and Old Executive Office Building.

Policy decisions in Washington are made by the principals – the president, the senators and the cabinet secretaries – but their decisions are significantly constrained by the information they receive. I served as associate staff secretary to President Obama from 2015 until the end of his term, building his briefing book and ensuring the appropriate staff edited and commented on the memos he received, and I saw how this information shaped the president’s choices. The president’s staff give the president a policy menu of memos, data and updates on government programmes. Extending the menu analogy, presidential decision-making looks a lot more like choosing from a few items on the prix fixe than dictating a specific meal to a private chef.


And what the meal looks like depends on how it’s described. Was the American economy strong for working Americans in 2015 because unemployment was low, or was the economy not nearly at full employment because the employment-to-population ratio had not recovered sufficiently from the Great Recession? That depends on the views of the members of the Council of Economic Advisers preparing data memos for the president. Should the administration pursue a carbon tax because it is the right thing to do even if it is unpopular, or should the administration pursue a more popular and less effective green energy policy? That in turndepends on what the data crunchers throughout the administration tell the principals, and how staff define what’s “popular”: is it what the polls say, or the consensus among Washington pundits?

So Biden’s decisions, like those of any president, are heavily influenced by what the staffers who populate the White House tell him. The new cohort of staff, who joined the administration when Biden took office, have fundamentally different views and experiences to those who worked under Obama’s presidency 12 years ago. Indeed, many of those staffers, myself included, saw Republicans block Obama at every turn, threatening to breach the debt ceiling in 2011, refusing to agree to additional stimulus when it was obviously necessary in 2013 and 2014, and preventingMerrick Garland from joining the supreme court. That was before the Republicans led America into a Donald Trump presidency, which exposed their austerity concerns as bogus and ended in an attempted coup.

The young Democratic staffers who dominate the White House and Capitol today have never known a Republican party worth negotiating with. They are tired of the Republicans and are convincing their principals to join them.And so a huge, popular stimulus package that includes child tax credits, increased health care subsidies and direct relief payments made its way through the Senate within two months of Biden’s inauguration, without a single Republican vote. When Washington pundits howled that the package was too large and not bipartisan, White House staff simply pointed to public opinion polling demonstrating the overwhelming popularity of the bill, marking a generational shift away from the centralised gatekeepers of Washington’s “Sunday shows”, the political talkshows that have represented and defined the mainstream current of Washington opinion for decades.

This generation of staffers haven’t just got different tactics: their ideological commitments are different too. Many of them lived through the Great Recession, have accumulated significantly less wealth than their baby boomer and gen X elders, and therefore have a much more positive view of how government action can improve people’s lives.

Beyond their economic experiences, they are also more diverse than their forebears. The Biden administration announced in January that of its first 100 appointees, over half were women and people of colour. Even young white Democrats, spurred by activists and protesters across the country, are significantly more progressive on racial justice and immigration issues than they would have been four or eight years ago. Many of the staffers who now occupy the White House worked for the Senate offices and primary campaigns of Warren and Sanders. Those senators didn’t win the primary, but their ideas can still be found in the White House, at least on domestic policy.

Yet while Democratic staff largely agree on most domestic issues, from transgender rights to increasing the power of workers, resistance still exists among some principals on other issues. The White House still remains hesitant over marijuana policy, for example; Biden is unwilling to join the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, in calling for a full legalisation of marijuana, and instead favours decriminalisation. And the Biden administration’s clear-sighted, progressive vision for domestic policy doesn’t extend to foreign policy. Unlike the numerous former Warren staffers running around the National Economic Council and treasury departments, the Situation Room doesn’t have leftwing Senate staffers moving through its doors.

Still, some good signs are perhaps emerging.The Democrats who now staff the White House came of age knowing that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were failures, and that Washington’s foreign policy “blob” – from the state department to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies – led us astray. And the agreement on what went wrong has paid some immediate dividends, with Biden overriding the national security apparatus to announce that the United States will leave Afghanistan this year after two long, largely pointless decades spent in the country.

Moving beyond what America should not do – like invade Iraq for no good reason – to the question of what America should doon the global stage will require leftwing Democrats to produce a robust, positive vision of American foreign policy. Foreign policy often involves making hard choices from a menu containing only bad options, and the left remains split over how to make those choices. Knee-jerk interventionism is bad, but so are China’s “re-education” camps and anti-democratic actions in Hong Kong. Sanctions often harm the people they’re intended to help, but how else should the United States fight back against the tide of rightwing authoritarianism?

As in the domestic sphere, there is space here for a younger, more diverse generation to begin to shift the paradigm. If Biden’s presidency is remembered as more progressive than anyone anticipated, they will have played no small part in making it so.

  • Joel Wertheimer is a civil rights attorney and was formerly associate staff secretary for Barack Obama
 
SlyPokerDog said:
7nquhrcwq9o71.jpg
Click to expand...
Biden is a piece of shit. It is known.

It's a shame that he's is so much better than the prior president...
 
Hoopguru said:
Good article and reflects big change but seems the willingness to achieve a compromised consensus is getting lost.

To understand why Joe Biden has shifted left, look at the people working for him
Joel Wertheimer
This article is more than 4 months old


The president’s radical domestic plans have been shaped by a new generation of staffers moving through the West Wing


‘Joe Biden’s decisions, like those of any president, are heavily influenced by what the staffers who populate the White House tell him.’ Photograph: Melina Mara/AP

In president Joe Biden’s first address to Congress last week, he celebrated the $1.9tn relief plan that passed within the first days of his presidency and proposed an ambitious $4tn plan for family care, green infrastructure, education and jobs that Democrats might have been surprised to hear from even Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. To understand how Biden, the 78-year-old self-proclaimed moderate, came to push such an ambitious and progressive domestic policy agenda, you can start by looking at the young lanyard-wearing staffers who populate the West Wing and Old Executive Office Building.

Policy decisions in Washington are made by the principals – the president, the senators and the cabinet secretaries – but their decisions are significantly constrained by the information they receive. I served as associate staff secretary to President Obama from 2015 until the end of his term, building his briefing book and ensuring the appropriate staff edited and commented on the memos he received, and I saw how this information shaped the president’s choices. The president’s staff give the president a policy menu of memos, data and updates on government programmes. Extending the menu analogy, presidential decision-making looks a lot more like choosing from a few items on the prix fixe than dictating a specific meal to a private chef.


And what the meal looks like depends on how it’s described. Was the American economy strong for working Americans in 2015 because unemployment was low, or was the economy not nearly at full employment because the employment-to-population ratio had not recovered sufficiently from the Great Recession? That depends on the views of the members of the Council of Economic Advisers preparing data memos for the president. Should the administration pursue a carbon tax because it is the right thing to do even if it is unpopular, or should the administration pursue a more popular and less effective green energy policy? That in turndepends on what the data crunchers throughout the administration tell the principals, and how staff define what’s “popular”: is it what the polls say, or the consensus among Washington pundits?

So Biden’s decisions, like those of any president, are heavily influenced by what the staffers who populate the White House tell him. The new cohort of staff, who joined the administration when Biden took office, have fundamentally different views and experiences to those who worked under Obama’s presidency 12 years ago. Indeed, many of those staffers, myself included, saw Republicans block Obama at every turn, threatening to breach the debt ceiling in 2011, refusing to agree to additional stimulus when it was obviously necessary in 2013 and 2014, and preventingMerrick Garland from joining the supreme court. That was before the Republicans led America into a Donald Trump presidency, which exposed their austerity concerns as bogus and ended in an attempted coup.

The young Democratic staffers who dominate the White House and Capitol today have never known a Republican party worth negotiating with. They are tired of the Republicans and are convincing their principals to join them.And so a huge, popular stimulus package that includes child tax credits, increased health care subsidies and direct relief payments made its way through the Senate within two months of Biden’s inauguration, without a single Republican vote. When Washington pundits howled that the package was too large and not bipartisan, White House staff simply pointed to public opinion polling demonstrating the overwhelming popularity of the bill, marking a generational shift away from the centralised gatekeepers of Washington’s “Sunday shows”, the political talkshows that have represented and defined the mainstream current of Washington opinion for decades.

This generation of staffers haven’t just got different tactics: their ideological commitments are different too. Many of them lived through the Great Recession, have accumulated significantly less wealth than their baby boomer and gen X elders, and therefore have a much more positive view of how government action can improve people’s lives.

Beyond their economic experiences, they are also more diverse than their forebears. The Biden administration announced in January that of its first 100 appointees, over half were women and people of colour. Even young white Democrats, spurred by activists and protesters across the country, are significantly more progressive on racial justice and immigration issues than they would have been four or eight years ago. Many of the staffers who now occupy the White House worked for the Senate offices and primary campaigns of Warren and Sanders. Those senators didn’t win the primary, but their ideas can still be found in the White House, at least on domestic policy.

Yet while Democratic staff largely agree on most domestic issues, from transgender rights to increasing the power of workers, resistance still exists among some principals on other issues. The White House still remains hesitant over marijuana policy, for example; Biden is unwilling to join the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, in calling for a full legalisation of marijuana, and instead favours decriminalisation. And the Biden administration’s clear-sighted, progressive vision for domestic policy doesn’t extend to foreign policy. Unlike the numerous former Warren staffers running around the National Economic Council and treasury departments, the Situation Room doesn’t have leftwing Senate staffers moving through its doors.

Still, some good signs are perhaps emerging.The Democrats who now staff the White House came of age knowing that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were failures, and that Washington’s foreign policy “blob” – from the state department to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies – led us astray. And the agreement on what went wrong has paid some immediate dividends, with Biden overriding the national security apparatus to announce that the United States will leave Afghanistan this year after two long, largely pointless decades spent in the country.

Moving beyond what America should not do – like invade Iraq for no good reason – to the question of what America should doon the global stage will require leftwing Democrats to produce a robust, positive vision of American foreign policy. Foreign policy often involves making hard choices from a menu containing only bad options, and the left remains split over how to make those choices. Knee-jerk interventionism is bad, but so are China’s “re-education” camps and anti-democratic actions in Hong Kong. Sanctions often harm the people they’re intended to help, but how else should the United States fight back against the tide of rightwing authoritarianism?

As in the domestic sphere, there is space here for a younger, more diverse generation to begin to shift the paradigm. If Biden’s presidency is remembered as more progressive than anyone anticipated, they will have played no small part in making it so.

  • Joel Wertheimer is a civil rights attorney and was formerly associate staff secretary for Barack Obama
Click to expand...

Sadly it isn't Biden that has shifted left. It is simply the policies he is being pushed into, by the left. Democrats aren't as left as they once were. It seems insane to me that a democrat needs to be... pulled to the left.

(just my two cents)
 
Phatguysrule said:
Biden is a piece of shit. It is known.

It's a shame that he's is so much better than the prior president...
Click to expand...
Still waiting for confirmation of that tweet. Not in any news site I can find it or site of environmental groups. Can anyone confirm if it is real?
 
Road Ratt said:
Sadly it isn't Biden that has shifted left. It is simply the policies he is being pushed into, by the left. Democrats aren't as left as they once were. It seems insane to me that a democrat needs to be... pulled to the left.

(just my two cents)
Click to expand...
agree, and thats what the article talks about. Joe's going with the flow at his age and being and still being a politician, he milking it and going through the motions. Im ok with that to be honest as he's paid his country club dues over the years and he's been wanting this job for a long while. I was happy to see Joe get resurrected and voted in.
 
Although Democrats are called radical left by right, positions have majority support:
Raise minimum wage
Fairer taxation
Immigration reform including path to citizenship
Common sense gun regulation
Legal abortion
Combatting Covid
Republican platform:
Tax cuts for the rich
Outlaw abortion
No restrictions on guns
Make it harder to vote
Elections they don't win are fraudulent.
Do nothing to stop Covid. Take horse dewormer if you get sick.
 
crandc said:
Although Democrats are called radical left by right, positions have majority support:
Raise minimum wage
Fairer taxation
Immigration reform including path to citizenship
Common sense gun regulation
Legal abortion
Combatting Covid
Click to expand...

Just socialist commie fascist talking points!!! QUIT TAKING AWAY MY BIBLE!

Republican platform:
Tax cuts for the rich
Outlaw abortion
No restrictions on guns
Make it harder to vote
Elections they don't win are fraudulent.
Do nothing to stop Covid. Take horse dewormer if you get sick.
Click to expand...


Well, eventually trickle down economics will work.

You know, maybe we should start labeling the vaccine as "ivermectin" for those fucking morons.
 
Hoopguru said:
Good article and reflects big change but seems the willingness to achieve a compromised consensus is getting lost.

To understand why Joe Biden has shifted left, look at the people working for him
Joel Wertheimer
This article is more than 4 months old


The president’s radical domestic plans have been shaped by a new generation of staffers moving through the West Wing


‘Joe Biden’s decisions, like those of any president, are heavily influenced by what the staffers who populate the White House tell him.’ Photograph: Melina Mara/AP

In president Joe Biden’s first address to Congress last week, he celebrated the $1.9tn relief plan that passed within the first days of his presidency and proposed an ambitious $4tn plan for family care, green infrastructure, education and jobs that Democrats might have been surprised to hear from even Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. To understand how Biden, the 78-year-old self-proclaimed moderate, came to push such an ambitious and progressive domestic policy agenda, you can start by looking at the young lanyard-wearing staffers who populate the West Wing and Old Executive Office Building.

Policy decisions in Washington are made by the principals – the president, the senators and the cabinet secretaries – but their decisions are significantly constrained by the information they receive. I served as associate staff secretary to President Obama from 2015 until the end of his term, building his briefing book and ensuring the appropriate staff edited and commented on the memos he received, and I saw how this information shaped the president’s choices. The president’s staff give the president a policy menu of memos, data and updates on government programmes. Extending the menu analogy, presidential decision-making looks a lot more like choosing from a few items on the prix fixe than dictating a specific meal to a private chef.


And what the meal looks like depends on how it’s described. Was the American economy strong for working Americans in 2015 because unemployment was low, or was the economy not nearly at full employment because the employment-to-population ratio had not recovered sufficiently from the Great Recession? That depends on the views of the members of the Council of Economic Advisers preparing data memos for the president. Should the administration pursue a carbon tax because it is the right thing to do even if it is unpopular, or should the administration pursue a more popular and less effective green energy policy? That in turndepends on what the data crunchers throughout the administration tell the principals, and how staff define what’s “popular”: is it what the polls say, or the consensus among Washington pundits?

So Biden’s decisions, like those of any president, are heavily influenced by what the staffers who populate the White House tell him. The new cohort of staff, who joined the administration when Biden took office, have fundamentally different views and experiences to those who worked under Obama’s presidency 12 years ago. Indeed, many of those staffers, myself included, saw Republicans block Obama at every turn, threatening to breach the debt ceiling in 2011, refusing to agree to additional stimulus when it was obviously necessary in 2013 and 2014, and preventingMerrick Garland from joining the supreme court. That was before the Republicans led America into a Donald Trump presidency, which exposed their austerity concerns as bogus and ended in an attempted coup.

The young Democratic staffers who dominate the White House and Capitol today have never known a Republican party worth negotiating with. They are tired of the Republicans and are convincing their principals to join them.And so a huge, popular stimulus package that includes child tax credits, increased health care subsidies and direct relief payments made its way through the Senate within two months of Biden’s inauguration, without a single Republican vote. When Washington pundits howled that the package was too large and not bipartisan, White House staff simply pointed to public opinion polling demonstrating the overwhelming popularity of the bill, marking a generational shift away from the centralised gatekeepers of Washington’s “Sunday shows”, the political talkshows that have represented and defined the mainstream current of Washington opinion for decades.

This generation of staffers haven’t just got different tactics: their ideological commitments are different too. Many of them lived through the Great Recession, have accumulated significantly less wealth than their baby boomer and gen X elders, and therefore have a much more positive view of how government action can improve people’s lives.

Beyond their economic experiences, they are also more diverse than their forebears. The Biden administration announced in January that of its first 100 appointees, over half were women and people of colour. Even young white Democrats, spurred by activists and protesters across the country, are significantly more progressive on racial justice and immigration issues than they would have been four or eight years ago. Many of the staffers who now occupy the White House worked for the Senate offices and primary campaigns of Warren and Sanders. Those senators didn’t win the primary, but their ideas can still be found in the White House, at least on domestic policy.

Yet while Democratic staff largely agree on most domestic issues, from transgender rights to increasing the power of workers, resistance still exists among some principals on other issues. The White House still remains hesitant over marijuana policy, for example; Biden is unwilling to join the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, in calling for a full legalisation of marijuana, and instead favours decriminalisation. And the Biden administration’s clear-sighted, progressive vision for domestic policy doesn’t extend to foreign policy. Unlike the numerous former Warren staffers running around the National Economic Council and treasury departments, the Situation Room doesn’t have leftwing Senate staffers moving through its doors.

Still, some good signs are perhaps emerging.The Democrats who now staff the White House came of age knowing that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were failures, and that Washington’s foreign policy “blob” – from the state department to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies – led us astray. And the agreement on what went wrong has paid some immediate dividends, with Biden overriding the national security apparatus to announce that the United States will leave Afghanistan this year after two long, largely pointless decades spent in the country.

Moving beyond what America should not do – like invade Iraq for no good reason – to the question of what America should doon the global stage will require leftwing Democrats to produce a robust, positive vision of American foreign policy. Foreign policy often involves making hard choices from a menu containing only bad options, and the left remains split over how to make those choices. Knee-jerk interventionism is bad, but so are China’s “re-education” camps and anti-democratic actions in Hong Kong. Sanctions often harm the people they’re intended to help, but how else should the United States fight back against the tide of rightwing authoritarianism?

As in the domestic sphere, there is space here for a younger, more diverse generation to begin to shift the paradigm. If Biden’s presidency is remembered as more progressive than anyone anticipated, they will have played no small part in making it so.

  • Joel Wertheimer is a civil rights attorney and was formerly associate staff secretary for Barack Obama
Click to expand...

It's amazing to hear that Biden didn't staff his administration entirely with other 78-year-olds. What was he thinking?

barfo
 
crandc said:
Although Democrats are called radical left by right, positions have majority support:
Raise minimum wage
Fairer taxation
Immigration reform including path to citizenship
Common sense gun regulation
Legal abortion
Combatting Covid
Republican platform:
Tax cuts for the rich
Outlaw abortion
No restrictions on guns
Make it harder to vote
Elections they don't win are fraudulent.
Do nothing to stop Covid. Take horse dewormer if you get sick.
Click to expand...

Must all your assertions be this hyperbolic?

Are your political beliefs really this oversimplified and binary? It’s no wonder we are still stuck in a two party system when people think politics are this black and white. For as much as you shit on religion you’ve managed to turn politics into a cartoonish battle between good and evil. The stuff of fables.
 
Thatbpguy said:
I know. He's always seemed very moderate to me. But now he's changed since becoming President. Why?
Click to expand...

He's positioned himself as far away from Trump as politically possible.
 
Q Congresswoman Lauren Boebert put an "imeach Biden" banner on her web page.
Ohio senator Rob Portman, a standard chamber of commerce Republican, is retiring. The two Republicans vying for the seat are trying to outdo one another in devotion to twice impeached loser. Josh Mandel is frothing about nonwhite immigrants and lectured the children of Martin Luther King about their father's "real" views. JD Vance endorsed Texas bounty hunter law. When asked if there should be an exception for rape, he called pregnancy from rape an inconvenience. Like your phone ringing when you're on the toilet.
 
crandc said:
Q Congresswoman Lauren Boebert put an "imeach Biden" banner on her web page.
Ohio senator Rob Portman, a standard chamber of commerce Republican, is retiring. The two Republicans vying for the seat are trying to outdo one another in devotion to twice impeached loser. Josh Mandel is frothing about nonwhite immigrants and lectured the children of Martin Luther King about their father's "real" views. JD Vance endorsed Texas bounty hunter law. When asked if there should be an exception for rape, he called pregnancy from rape an inconvenience. Like your phone ringing when you're on the toilet.
Click to expand...

Had she spelled it correctly, no one would give two shits that she did it. Since she "spelled it wrong", it became news. It's all intentional. They're how stupid people think smart people act.
 
crandc said:
Q Congresswoman Lauren Boebert put an "imeach Biden" banner on her web page.
Ohio senator Rob Portman, a standard chamber of commerce Republican, is retiring. The two Republicans vying for the seat are trying to outdo one another in devotion to twice impeached loser. Josh Mandel is frothing about nonwhite immigrants and lectured the children of Martin Luther King about their father's "real" views. JD Vance endorsed Texas bounty hunter law. When asked if there should be an exception for rape, he called pregnancy from rape an inconvenience. Like your phone ringing when you're on the toilet.
Click to expand...
What strikes me is that I used to think most politicians were the best and the brightest. But when I see politicians imploring to impeach a President (any President) who has done nothing to be impeached about it makes me then consider how low many of our politicians have become. I just shake my head.
 
Thatbpguy said:
What strikes me is that I used to think most politicians were the best and the brightest. But when I see politicians imploring to impeach a President (any President) who has done nothing to be impeached about it makes me then consider how low many of our politicians have become. I just shake my head.
Click to expand...
That's what happens when you pay your leaders shit compared to their peers, and allow them to take bribes.

It becomes a race to the bottom to see who can extract the most money from the system while maintaining power as long as possible.
 
BigGameDamian said:
Click to expand...


Pelosi is a lying stack of crap. Joe Manchin and his corporate owned pack of democrats want to kill the reconciliation bill because it would hurt corporate profits over actually helping people.

If Joe Biden allows Joe Manchin to kill this part of the bill, it will show that Biden is no leader what-so-ever.
 
Road Ratt said:
Pelosi is a lying stack of crap. Joe Manchin and his corporate owned pack of democrats want to kill the reconciliation bill because it would hurt corporate profits over actually helping people.

If Joe Biden allows Joe Manchin to kill this part of the bill, it will show that Biden is no leader what-so-ever.
Click to expand...
Joe Biden agrees with Manchin. He has a long history of voting as evidence... So it's up to his staff and base to force the issue.
 
You know, calling a person a lying sack of shit doesn't exactly advance discussion. Just say what you disagree with and we can go from there.
 
crandc said:
You know, calling a person a lying sack of shit doesn't exactly advance discussion. Just say what you disagree with and we can go from there.
Click to expand...

I hear ya. It's almost like calling someone a Hitler lover.
 
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