While we’ve briefly touched on how Biden and Carper marched in lockstep on behalf of the credit card banks and Big Pharma, we, or, to be more specific, I, have been derelict in providing an analysis of Biden’s political beliefs. Which is OK, b/c Zack Carter of the Huffington Post provides a useful primer for all of us. The takeaway?:
In more than four decades of public service, Biden has enthusiastically championed policies favored by financial elites, forging alliances with Wall Street and the political right to notch legislative victories that ran counter to the populist ideas that now animate his party. If he declares for the presidency, Biden will face a Democratic electorate that has moved on from his brand of politics.
Biden enthusiastically embraced corporate opposition to antitrust efforts:
But Kennedy almost immediately ran into problems with Biden. When Coca-Cola urged Congress to exempt the soft drink industry from these antitrust regulations, Biden joined Republicans to pass such a bill over the objections of Kennedy and Department of Justice antitrust expert Ky Ewing, who concluded that the bill was “special interest legislation” with “no evidence” to support it.
Antitrust law was an early salvo in what became a quarter-century struggle to shift the Democratic Party’s base of support away from organized labor toward large corporations. The Biden-Kennedy split carried symbolic connotations beyond the policy implications of their individual votes. Where Kennedy wanted to use the Judiciary Committee to continue the old New Deal-era attack on corporate power, Biden became an advocate for corporate interests that had previously been associated with the Republican Party.
Biden embraced Reaganism more than some Republicans:
He voted for a landmark Reagan tax bill that slashed the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and exempted many wealthy families from the estate tax on unearned inheritances, a measure that cost the federal government an estimated $83 billion in annual revenue. He then called for a spending freeze on Social Security in order to reduce the deficits that tax law helped to create.
“While this program is severe,” Biden said on the Senate floor, “it is the only proposal that will halt the upward spiral of deficits,” which supposedly threatened “an economic and political crisis of extraordinary proportions” within 18 months.
Biden then became a cheerleader for Clinton centrism:
“I was one of those guys in 1987 who tried to run on a platform that Clinton basically ran on in 1992,” Biden told National Journal in 2001. He dismissed criticisms of the Clinton years as empty “class warfare and populism.”
There indeed was class warfare…against the poorer classes. Biden voted for Clinton’s so-called ‘welfare reform’ package. He supported Clinton’s cuts on capital gains from real estate and investments. He, of course, was a leading proponent of banking deregulation, which Clinton also championed in exchange for mega-millions in campaign contributions. And while the article didn’t address it, he chose Big Pharma over health care consumers every chance that he got.
I hope he doesn’t run. If he does, I hope and believe that he will flame out quickly. On merit. Ain’t enough apologies from Workin’ Man Joe to run from his record. Not even if this is his campaign theme, which it should be:
