{UAH} THE FRAUDLENT HAS A MINOR PROBLEM IN HIS HOUSE

Progressive interests want a transition team that Biden isn't giving them

by Jeremy Beaman, Commentary Fellow

 

November 18, 2020 04:49 PM

Ay, there’s the rub: whether 'tis nobler to foster relationships with industry and leverage them to win elections or to rely on a wholly populist strategy?

As President-elect Joe Biden sets up his transition team, fissures continue to form within the Democratic coalition. The reason is, the Democratic coalition has at least two subcoalitions that simply do politics differently.

Left-wing Democrats made it clear that they did not prefer Biden but that they would tolerate him. The policy differences between Biden and them are one thing. For all the leftward movement Biden has made, he is not revolutionary enough for the revolutionaries.

More transition-related problems are starting to bubble up for Biden because he is appointing people who, as far as the progressives are concerned, stand on the wrong side of the all-important corporate interest question. Biden’s choice of Democratic Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana as his senior adviser and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement set off a few interest groups because he doesn’t have the right liberal bona fides.

“Representative Cedric Richmond is one of the top democratic recipients of fossil fuel money,” the group Justice Democrats said in a statement, continuing, “Richmond has been aggressively criticized by his own constituents for failing to act on their concerns revolving around industry regulations and the climate crisis.” It sounds like primary season.

“Today feels like a betrayal,” Sunrise Movement Executive Director Varshini Prakash said in a statement, according to CNN (emphasis added). Prakash referred to Richmond’s relationship to “Big Oil and Gas.”

Richmond indeed has benefited from the oil and gas industry, which gave him $112,600 just this election cycle, according to OpenSecrets. But it seems that in the minds of Biden and many other Democrats, that’s just how politics works. Money helps candidates win, so they take what they can get. It may not be ideal. It may even be “corrosive,” as Biden said years ago. Though "people who accept the money from [lobbyists] aren’t bad people," he also said. "But it’s human nature.”

Not so for the progressives. Imagine how they feel about this: As of Nov. 11, Biden had at least 40 current and former lobbyists on his transition team, according to the Wall Street Journal. Steve Ricchetti, whom Biden chose to be his counselor, used to co-own a lobbying firm himself. This is not what they had hoped for when they planned to push Biden in "a more progressive direction across policy issues."

Democrats took an electoral beating in Florida, losing two U.S. House seats and five state House seats. Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani thinks part of the answer to victory in the future is “systematic change” in their funding strategy, telling Politico that small-dollar donations are “the way to transform the party.” Remember, it was the small dollars that fueled Bernie Sanders’s campaigns.

There are real points of disagreement here. Progressives have the repudiation of special interests at their center. It’s in their DNA. Sanders has been railing against special interests since before I was born. In administration hires disconnected from the revolving door, progressives want something that Biden seems either unwilling or unable to give them.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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