Liberals are not happy with Joe Biden.
See, on Tuesday, Biden announced a series of senior staff hires for his incoming administration that included lobbyist Steve Ricchetti and Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana.
“If Joe Biden continues making corporate-friendly appointments to his White House, he will risk quickly fracturing the hard-earned goodwill his team built with progressives to defeat Donald Trump,” Justice Democrats executive director Alexandra Rojas said in a statement. “A Biden administration dominated by corporate-friendly insiders like Steve Ricchetti and Cedric Richmond will not help the President-elect usher in the most progressive Democratic administration in generations.”
Here’s the thing, though: What, exactly, did the left expect here?
Biden spent more than three decades in the Senate before ascending to the vice presidency. During all of that time, he cast himself as a moderate driven by pragmatism and deal-making.
In his just-completed presidential campaign, Biden repeatedly opposed liberal policy proposals like “Medicare for All” and the “Green New Deal.”
And amid attacks from President Donald Trump that Biden was beholden to socialist ideas and leaders within his party, he forcefully reminded voters that “I beat the socialist. That’s how I got elected. That’s how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist.”
Given all of that (Biden’s decades of public service and everything he said in the course of the campaign) why would liberals believe that Biden would bend to their desires when it came to his senior staff? Or to his Cabinet picks? (Ahem, Elizabeth Warren, ahem).
Biden told everyone — the left included — exactly what sort of president he would be. One who believed that Trump was an anomaly, that Republicans were good people who could be dealt with in a post-Trump era and that deal-making and centrist politics were the right way forward.
He’s not going to go back on it now that he’s won the White House.
The Point: If liberals are upset about Ricchetti and Richmond, well, I’ve got some bad news for them. Judging by Biden’s longtime approach to politics, there’s plenty more where that came from.
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