Thread by @gerryconway

I’ve heard some on the left worry @JoeBiden won’t be progressive enough, won’t fight back against #GOP perfidy, etc., because he’s always been a moderate. Hey. Who a President was, politically, before he becomes President, and what he “stood for”, is historically irrelevant.

Lincoln wasn’t in favor of abolition when he ran for President; he ran as a “moderate” against slavery’s expansion, not its elimination. He fought against emancipation for months until he finally came around. His opponents in the South forced him to change.

FDR ran as a fiscal, social *conservative* in 1932, promising a balanced budget and no deficits. His political party had other ideas— most New Deal legislation was a result of FDR watering down those ideas, not pushing them forward. He took bold action because he *had* to.

Liberal icon JFK was a social and fiscal conservative. Period. His big economic idea going into the 1963 election cycle was a top rate TAX CUT. If he’d lived it’s doubtful he would have pushed or successfully enacted *any* of the civil rights and social legislation LBJ did.

Nixon was the most liberal and progressive President of the last fifty years. Period. No President since has enacted as much social and economic justice and ecological justice legislation as Nixon. None.

George H.W. Bush was a moderate liberal in conservative clothing.

Clinton was a moderate conservative in liberal clothing.

George W. Bush intended to be a moderate conservative in conservative clothing but 9/11 happened and, well, f**k. If Al Gore had been elected he would have been a moderate conservative in liberal clothing till 9/11 happened, and, well, f**k.

Presidents don’t lead, they reflect. The best Presidents rise to the occasion history presents them with— they don’t create history, they channel it. Good Presidents read the national mood and manage to provide what the people need, not what they want.

You simply cannot predict how a President will behave in office. Even Trump has defied prediction— mostly by being less cunning and savvy than even our worst imaginings. He’s a failure because he’s an outlier, not because of his actions or policy or behavior.

If/when he comes into office in 2021, President Joe Biden will be the President the country needs precisely *because* he doesn’t have a passionate progressive policy position— which will allow him to channel history the way Lincoln, FDR, and even Nixon (none ideological) did.

Biden is a good man with good instincts— one of which is a highly tuned sense of empathy that makes him the perfect man to channel history and the national mood. He may not initiate progressive policy but he will enable and empower it, as FDR did throughout the 1930s.

So, to my fellow progressives: Relax.

To quote another old man from Biden’s generation,

“You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime you find
You get what you need”