Biden’s Extreme? Really?

In his editorial, “’Moderate’ Joe Biden has moved way to the left,” Jeff Jacoby omits important context. In addition to one bald misrepresentation, claiming that Obama opposed a public option in the ACA rather than negotiating it away in a futile attempt to woo Republican moderates, he leaves out the history of conservatives dragging their party and our country far right for the past four decades. Their policies since Reagan, and regrettably including Bill Clinton, prescribed the unbridled capitalism that led to an increasing gulf between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else that in turn brought us despair that led to suicide and addiction and, ultimately, President Donald Trump. To him, restoring the federal minimum wage to an inflation-adjusted level commensurate with that of the 1960s, a reasonable correction that President Nixon would probably have supported, is wild-eyed radicalism.

And treating climate change as a crisis demanding immediate and drastic action is symptomatic of our “hyper-polarized era” rather than a genuine crisis about which the scientific community has warned us for decades (initially with bipartisan acknowledgement). Jacoby would have us believe that corrective moves in the direction of a national consensus is a radical political aberration; talk about hyper-partisanship!

[Submitted as a letter to the editor of The Boston Globe but not selected for publication]