Biden’s Cabinet draws from his roots

Choices reflect long-held Democratic principles; critics frustrated by lack of progressive ideology

WASHINGTON — His economic and environment teams are a little left of center. His foreign policy picks fall squarely in the Democratic Party’s mainstream. His top White House aides are Washington veterans.

Taken together, the picture that emerges from President-elect Joe Biden’s initial wave of personnel choices is a familiar, pragmatic and largely centrist one.

That fits with the implicit deal that the former vice president and longtime senator offered Democrats during the 2020 primaries — that he was neither as progressive as Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, nor a product of Wall Street like Michael Bloomberg, the Republican-turned-Democrat who failed in his last-minute attempt to offer a moderate alternative to Biden.

Still a work in progress, Biden’s Cabinet is designed to be an extension of his own ideology, rooted in long-held Democratic Party principles but with a greater focus on the plight of working-class Americans, a new sense of urgency about climate change and a deeper empathy about the issues of racial justice that he has said persuaded him to run for the presidency a third time.

His nominees are a reflection of the image that his campaign conveyed and that powered his defeat of President Donald Trump. They are diverse in ways that appeal to liberals, young voters and people of color. And they are moderate like the swing voters who helped him win in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

“That’s him,” said Bill Daley, who served as White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama. “That’s his whole campaign.”

For his Cabinet, Obama assembled outsize personalities like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, the defense secretary who was a holdover from the George W. Bush administration.

Biden’s Cabinet so far has no one likely to draw the same kind of high-octane attention. His choices have decades of quiet, behind-the-scenes policymaking experience, matching Biden’s pledge to return basic competence to the government after four years of Trump’s chaotic administration.

His nominees and choice of top White House aides make only a nod to the progressive movement in the Democratic Party that helped Biden win the election. That has left some of the party’s liberals frustrated by what they say is the creation of a new administration dominated by old thinking, unprepared to confront the post-Trumpian world of deeper racial and economic inequities and more entrenched Republican resistance.

There is no one yet in Biden’s Cabinet carrying the torch for the policies that he campaigned against during the primaries: free college for everyone, a costly Green New Deal, an anti-Wall Street agenda, universal health care and steep increases in the minimum wage.

The danger, said Faiz Shakir, who managed Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, is that Biden does not pay sufficient attention to the struggle of working-class people, whose fortunes have declined under the economic policies of presidents from both parties. He said a return to the Democratic status quo, before Trump’s presidency, was not enough.

“One of the concerns is that you want to pierce the bubble of how our Democratic elites have thought about politics and policymaking and urge them to go bolder,” Shakir said. “And now we’re relying on a lot of people’s instincts who’ve been honed, quite frankly, during a different era of politics.”

Varshini Prakash, the executive director and a founder of the Sunrise Movement, a liberal group focused on climate change, praised Biden’s environmental picks as a welcome “departure from the leave-it-tothe-markets way of thinking that defined the early 2000s.”

But she said she hoped that Biden would do more to promote younger people whose experience is not defined by previous generations.

“It is still an older, whiter, male-er group in general,” she said. “We are never going to develop the leadership we need for decades to come if we keep appointing people who are in their 60s and 70s who have served in multiple administrations already.”

The fingerprints of Ron Klain, the incoming White House chief of staff and a longtime aide to Biden, are already evident in the selection of White House advisers with the kind of stature and experience to face off with the Cabinet secretaries during debates over complex and difficult issues.

Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national security adviser, will oversee domestic policy for Biden.