Yglesias: Why did Biden's handlers go nuts?

Biden insiders turned out to be boring mainstream Democrats. Yet, they still went crazy for transgenderism, immigration, George Floyd, and "equity." How come?

Matthew Yglesias writes at his Slow Boring* website:

What we don't learn in "Original Sin"

Who was driving the Biden administration's controversial policy choices?

MATTHEW YGLESIAS

MAY 27

Like everyone in Washington, I’ve read the new Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson book, “Original Sin.” …

But I had a lot of questions about the Biden administration and what actually happened, and I was hoping the book might answer some of them. Unfortunately, it mostly doesn’t. …

But one part of the book is really not like the others. Michael Bennet recounts seeing Biden flub the name of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas at an immigration debate, and he reflects that maybe Biden’s age explains why the administration’s actual immigration policy is so muddled and murky. Bennet decides that the problem is that the Democratic Party is in a state of disagreement about what to do here, and that without a full-time president, there just isn’t a clear choice or direction. This sounds plausible to me, and I’ve heard other members of Congress offer similar speculation.

Critically, though, Bennet by his own admission is just spitballing. And the book does not answer the question of whether Bennet is right. …

And that is the central enigma of the Biden administration: What was going on as they made policy decisions? The Bush, Obama, and First Trump administrations all generated plentiful tick-tock reporting on what happened at various key moments.

Do we have any good reporting on why the Obama Administration, after a cautious first term, egged on the Great Awokening in its second term? I mean, I predicted it in my 2008 book America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance,” but it would be nice if some historian would bother to write up the inside story.

With Biden, we never really got that. And there’s so much we still don’t know.

One issue is that Biden has always been boring. I read a chapter about him in Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1972 in 1974 and another in Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes in the early 1990s, and even these two great political writers couldn’t make him interesting.

Tapper and Thompson describe decisions in the Biden White House as dominated by a small group of senior advisors — Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Ron Klain, Bruce Reed, and Anthony Bernal (Jill Biden’s chief of staff) — that they dub The Politburo. Or, rather, they say that this inner circle group was called The Politburo inside the administration. This may be true, though I always heard it described as “the inner circle,” and sometimes Anita Dunn and/or Annie Tomasini were also regarded as members of the inner circle.

As I responded repeatedly to the conspiracy theorists, the feeble old Biden’s shadowy “handlers” weren’t anybody interesting: they were just Democratic political lifers who had been handpicked by Joe and Jill for their loyalty to Biden.

Regardless, the thing that even in retrospect I find puzzling is that with the exception of Bernal, who many people dislike, these are pretty seasoned Democratic Party operatives.

And they are very decidedly from the moderate wing of the party. ...

So why did the Biden Administration push what, from the perspective of 2025, seem like crazy leftwing policies on transgenderism, immigration, crime, and “equity?”

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