Joe Biden’s Man on the Left
Not long after the 2008 election, Jared Bernstein caught a predawn Amtrak train to Wilmington, Delaware, and then schlepped several miles to Joe Biden’s house for a job interview. As Biden walked him into the kitchen, Bernstein spotted a brand-new espresso machine, the kind you might hear squealing away at an overpriced coffee shop. “Want a cup?” Biden asked Bernstein. He reached into a cabinet just above the espresso machine and took out a jar of instant coffee.
“To this day, I think he was testing me,” Bernstein told me. “If I had said, I’m not going to drink that, I probably wouldn’t have got the job.”
Biden’s pointedly lowbrow tastes are part of the case that Bernstein, a labor economist, has been making on behalf of the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. You might think that Biden is some flavorless, middle-of-the-road Democrat, but Bernstein insists that the former vice president is really a populist rabble-rouser with a proven left-wing streak—just like him. “Sometimes people say, Biden’s a moderate,” he said. “But I don’t know any moderates who have been that closely linked to the labor movement for their whole political career.”
Bernstein is what lefties wish they had in their candidate: Biden won’t go anywhere near pipe dreams like a wealth tax and a jobs guarantee. Bernstein has espoused both. Biden secured the Democratic nomination by thumping one progressive contender after another. Those same progressives love Bernstein. “His inclination on many economic issues has been close to agreement with Bernie Sanders’s,” Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s 2020 campaign manager, told me.
Bernstein was Biden’s chief economist at the start of his vice presidency, one of just a handful of eggheads dealt the oh so small job of patching up the economy right when the Great Recession hit. Before leaving the administration in 2011, Bernstein was one of the White House’s rare lefties, his voiceonce-in-a-lifetime economic calamity. “Jared is someone the veep trusts, and someone who has trust across the spectrum of the Democratic Party,” said a top Biden policy adviser, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the campaign’s policy deliberations. “The guy is a frickin’ labor economist at a moment when we have a historic unemployment crisis.”
