What a difference a decade makes

This WaPO story about Biden’s unprecedented support for the Amazon union drive brings up something that was mentioned in the thread below — the truly appalling statement Jay Carney gave while Scott Walker was in the process of crushing public sector unions in Wisconsin:

That’s not even neutral — it’s just flat-out supporting Walker’s destruction of the rights of a critical Democratic constituency using pro-austerity language.

While I do think that Biden is a little more instinctively progressive on labor issues than Obama — as a generational thing if nothing else — that’s not the major thing going on here. If Biden and Obama had been president in reverse order, I doubt the results would be much different. This is about the coalition, not the president. Whether he became the nominee is not the only or even the best way of measuring the impact of Bernie’s primary campaigns — the leftward shift among Dem elites in general is a big deal. And it’s not just Bernie, of course — it’s Warren and AOC and Schatz and many other progressive politicians and countless less famous activists. There is still a lot of work to be done, but to deny what has already taken place would be foolish.