Briahna Joy Gray, former press secretary for the 2020 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), argued Wednesday that President Biden is “backing away already” from “populist offerings,” which she said could harm the Democratic Party in the long-run.
In an interview on Hilll.TV’s “Rising,” the contributing editor for Current Affairs magazine said that one of former President Obama’s “biggest mistakes” was to ignore a mandate to “spend the money needed to bail people out,” of the economic crisis he inherited at the start of his presidency.
“He had all three branches of government, and he didn’t do with it what I think a lot of Americans wished he would,” Gray said. “Economists largely agreed that he didn’t spend enough to actually rectify the crisis.”
Gray added that as a result, Democrats “ended up with a Republican insurance plan that was largely a giveaway to the private insurance industry while ultimately resulting in… driving up premiums in a way that really set the stage for Republicans and namely Donald Trump to position themselves as a populist alternative to the unwise spending of the Democratic Party.”
The host of the “Bad Faith” podcast added that Biden could be repeating these mistakes, including by proposing $1,400 checks for Americans in his coronavirus stimulus package, instead of the $2,000 called for by many Democrats.
“There’s a crisis here where there’s a lot of people who would be willing to give him some latitude to push through big, FDR-style programs if they actually inured to the benefit of working people, and it doesn’t seem as though right now that’s his inclination,” Gray said of Biden.
Watch part of Gray’s interview above.
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