December 2, 2020 ☼ biden ☼ lefties
Source: POLITICO - Link
Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed are two longtime friends who both had high-level experience in the Clinton and Obama White House and now share another bond: Prominent voices on the left are urging President-elect Joe Biden not to bring them on for yet another tour of government service.
As it happens, Emanuel and Reed in 2005 also co-authored a book, The Plan: Big Ideas for America, in which these two Democratic moderates offered their prescriptions for the Democratic Party and the country in the generation ahead.
There must be a copy on the shelf around here somewhere. Surely it will be entertaining to read the cringeworthy things these centrists advocated 15 years ago, back when their timid, Clintonesque brand of politics was still in vogue. Probably there will be chapters urging Democrats to take it easy on Wall Street and tone down their class-warfare rhetoric. Perhaps sermons on bipartisanship and some tough-on-crime ideas to reassure anxious suburbanites.
Actually, turns out none of that is in The Plan. What is there are proposals—well before the idea of Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders running for president was widely contemplated—for robust expansion of government to allow universal access to free college; universal health care for children; increases in the minimum wage and on taxes paid by the wealthy and corporations; and investments in clean energy with the aim of cutting national gasoline consumption in half by 2015.
Now the people who advocated these ideas are viewed as apostates by the Democratic left.
Center-left is not bad.