Progressives to send Biden a loud message
Health care, foreign policy crucial to state delegation
Joe Biden will get a preview of what’s in store for his potential presidency when the Democratic National Convention starts Monday: pressure from progressives to tack left.
Known to brag more about his work across the aisle with Republicans than his progressive bona fides, Biden will be facing an energized left flank that wants to ensure he won’t forget them if he wins.
“We want to be clear: We are saying, ‘Vote for Joe Biden.’ But we are going to make our demands known,” said Marcy Winograd, a delegate from Santa Barbara who is spearheading opposition to Biden’s potential foreign policy team. “And once he gets elected, there will be no
honeymoon.”
Even without an actual gathering in Milwaukee — Democrats are being forced to deliver all four nights of speeches from remote locations because of the coronavirus pandemic — Biden’s coronation week will be dominated by calls for him to adopt Medicare for All and a Green New Deal and to defund the police.
A lot of that heat will be coming from the California delegation, which is led by progressive Bay Area Reps. Barbara Lee and Ro Khanna and the more centrist Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis.
Khanna, of Fremont, has already announced that he won’t support the party’s platform because it doesn’t back Medicare for All, a governmentadministered health care system that would eliminate private insurance. Instead, it would keep the current system and allow users to buy into the governmentrun Medicare program through a public option, which is Biden’s preferred plan.
With the coronavirus pandemic highlighting longstanding inequities in the quality and accessibility of medical treatment in the U.S., “I believe that moving away from a profitbased health care system is the moral issue of our time,” Khanna wrote in an opinion piece. “Because of that belief, I could not vote for a platform that lacks a clear statement supporting Medicare for All.”
He’s not alone. Progressives say more than 750 delegates won’t support the party’s platform this week, largely for the same reason. While that’s not enough to sidetrack the statement of Democratic principles — there will be 4,750 delegates at the convention — progressives hope it will be enough to send a loud message.
Another 400 delegates, led by Winograd, have signed a letter urging Biden not to add several people to his foreign policy team who have “demonstrated poor judgment on national security issues” in the past.
Their donothire list includes several members of the Obama administration, including former undersecretary of defense Michèle Flournoy, former United Nations ambassador Samantha Power and former national security adviser Susan Rice, who was on Biden’s short list of possible running mates before he chose California Sen. Kamala Harris.
Over the weekend, several progressive groups supportive of Sanders hosted an inperson gathering called “People’s Assembly: “Building Beyond Bernie” in Los Angeles. Organizers, who included several Sanders delegates, say they held this “shadow convention” where they advocated for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal because the virtual convention “denies delegates a voice and renders us invisible.”
Elsewhere, the Progressive Democrats of America will host two hours of online counterprogramming every night of the convention — before the party’s primetime events begin — called the People’s Convention.
The message that progressives want to send, said Norman Solomon, a Sanders delegate from Marin County, is that “we’re not kidding around. This is a matter of life and death. We’re not going to go quietly into this valley of death, Mr. Biden. And we don’t want other people in this country to, either.”
Solomon’s organization, Roots Action, is rallying progressives to get behind Biden in several battleground states. It calls its campaign “Vote Trump Out/Then Challenge Biden.”
While it may be harder for progressives to grab media attention without an inperson gathering, Rep. Lee said the virtual convention might engage more people than normal because travel won’t be a barrier for those who couldn’t afford the trip to Wisconsin.
“I think this really speaks to how creative we can get, because you certainly have members all over the country, not just in California, who agree or don’t agree with aspects of the platform,” said Lee, who represents Oakland.
Amar Shergill, chair of the
California Democratic Party’s 800member progressive caucus, said progressive activists will be hounding Biden the moment he takes his hand off the Bible during his inauguration.
“Many Democrats will be surprised how aggressive the advocacy campaign will be on day one,” Shergill said.
Matt Morrison, who is organizing bluecollar voters in several battleground states, isn’t concerned that the progressive sniping will alienate centrist voters.
“What’s pulling Biden and Harris leftward is not forces on the convention stage, it’s the electorate itself,” said Morrison, who is executive director of Working America, a laborfunded group. “It’s the underlying financial vulnerability of 5 million people losing their health care and 20% of renters facing eviction.”
Solomon said there isn’t the animosity between progressives and Biden that there was with Hillary Clinton at the 2016 convention. Sanders supporters even jeered Lee that year when she mentioned Clinton’s name at a California delegation breakfast. An estimated 12% of people who voted for Sanders in the primaries went on to back Trump in the general election, according to a Tufts University study.
“Progressives hated Hillary Clinton,” Solomon said. “They don’t feel that way toward Biden.”
But that doesn’t mean that they’ll march in lockstep with him. Khanna argues that even if it doesn’t deliver outright victories for progressives, pressure to move the Democratic Party leftward can result in incremental change.
“Nobody understands the realities of incrementalism better than progressives,” Khanna wrote. “I see a vote of conscience against the platform as an ultimate show of unity. A party that cannot embrace honest debate and differences of opinion would be too rigid to learn or to grow wiser.”
Both Khanna and Lee have been at the vanguard of pushing their party to the left not just in Congress, but also in electoral politics. Khanna was a national cochair of Sanders’ campaign, and Lee is a longtime member of the House Progressive Caucus and a leading antiwar advocate.
But both are also pragmatic. They have actively courted Republicans on issues where they can find common ground and have shown in Washington they can vote for compromises.
“You look at Congressman Khanna and my past in terms of my legislative efforts and what we have done on a lot of policies, we always work in a bipartisan way on most issues where we come to agreement,” Lee told The Chronicle, citing as examples her work on HIV/ AIDS, cannabis reform and the military.
When Democrats retook the House in 2018, many analysts wondered whether progressives would embrace the hardline tactics of the GOP’s right flank in Congress. The House Freedom Caucus would frequently scuttle legislative deals by refusing to vote for them, forcing Republican leadership to seek Democratic allies if it wanted to pass bills.
But progressives have not followed suit, working instead to pull legislation as far to the left as they can in negotiations and then supporting Democratic leadership on the House floor.
Progressive Caucus cochair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, DWash., told “The Daily Show” that progressives could support Biden and hold him accountable. She was a member of the unity committee that sought to find common policy ground between Sanders and Biden after the former vice president clinched the nomination. Their report formed the base of much of the party’s platform.
“I will be right there with him. I will be doing everything I can to support and get everyone to turn out for Joe Biden,” Jayapal said. “And I will be pushing him, as soon as we get him in the White House.”