There is no one yet in Mr. 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 Mr. Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, is that Mr. 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. Shakir said. Whatever the views of the individual secretaries, their mandates once in office will now be defined by the new president’s promises and policies.

Source: New York Times December 19, 2020 17:51 UTC