Jamelle Bouie writes:

Joe Biden built his political career as the New Deal order came to an end, one of a generation of Democrats who sought to reconcile the Democratic Party to the Reagan revolution by placing distance between the party and the racial and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. His was a politics attuned to the worries and fears of suburban white voters, from busing and crime to guns and drugs.

Now, of course, those politics are outdated. The Democratic Party has, in the decades since Biden first won office in 1972, come to rely on the groups that fueled those upheavals. The insurgents are the establishment, and Biden — after eight years as vice president to a man who embodied the liberal, cosmopolitan shift in the Democratic Party — has reconciled himself to the new reality. He is still a centrist, but that center is well to the left of where it was even a decade ago.

The coronavirus pandemic and ensuing economic crisis have done even more to enlarge the scope of possibility, and Biden, always attuned to changing political winds, has adjusted himself accordingly. Instead of an Obama restoration, Gabriel Debenetti writes in New York magazine, the former vice president is planning a New Deal-esque effort to save American society.

“I think it’s probably the biggest challenge in modern history, quite frankly. I think it may not dwarf but eclipse what F.D.R. faced,” Biden told Chris Cuomo of CNN last month.

“The blinders have been taken off because of this Covid crisis,” he said to a group of 68 donors who gathered on Zoom for a fund-raiser a few weeks later. “I think people are realizing, ‘My Lord, look at what is possible,’ looking at the institutional changes we can make, without us becoming a ‘socialist country’ or any of that malarkey.”

There is good reason to be skeptical of Biden. He is a creature of the Senate. He’s a lifelong moderate. He’s a deal-maker. He prefers compromise.

But let’s say that Biden is serious, that he wants to bring the full weight of the federal government to bear on the crisis before us, that he wants to expand and revitalize the safety net for the next generation — and that he wants to be a transformative president. If that’s true, then he’ll have to do more than talk about his goals; he’ll have to build his administration with that task in mind. And if the first step in that process is choosing a vice president, then there’s one contender who has thought (and thought creatively) about government in a way that will aid and enhance an F.D.R.-style presidency: Elizabeth Warren. [Continue reading…]