Alumni of the Obama administration mocked the media this week for suggesting that Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., whom presidential candidate Joe Biden recently chose as his running mate, is a “moderate.”
“It was hilarious to me that she’s being called, in all this coverage, a ‘moderate,’ like Joe Biden has found a fellow moderate or centrist,” said Jon Favreau, one of former President Barack Obama’s speechwriters, himself promoting the false leftist trope that Biden is a moderate.
“She supports something extremely close to ‘Medicare for All,’ which Bernie Sanders acknowledged in his statement supporting her,” Favreau continued. “She’s for the Green New Deal. She has one of the most liberal records in the U.S. Senate.”
Favreau said that if Harris is a “moderate,” progressives have shifted “the Overton window” so successfully that “supporting the Green New Deal and basically ‘Medicare for all’ is now moderate and centrist,” he explained in an episode of Pod Save America with fellow former Obama staffers Daniel Pfeiffer and Alyssa Mastromonaco.
The term refers to a window of opportunity in which political ideologies might capitalize on current events or crises to push a previously unpopular agenda.
However, despite recent race riots and other catalyzing events that the Left has sought to exploit, there is no evidence that widespread public sentiment has shifted substantially alongside that of the media and radical activists.
National polls show a negligible difference between Biden’s current standing and that of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election at the same time.
In the bid to unseat the incumbent Trump, several mainstream media outlets have wildly insisted that Harris is the “pragmatic moderate” running-mate Biden has been looking for.
“In adding Harris to the ticket,” the Associated Press claimed, Biden “can point to her relatively centrist record on issues such as health care and her background in law enforcement in the nation’s largest state.”
The Los Angeles Times said in a headline, “Picking Harris, Biden puts centrist stamp on Democrats’ future.”
“Kamala Harris is a natural centrist who combines the authority of a prosecutor with the enthusiasm of a skillful retail politician,” the Economist claimed.
The New York Times similarly declared, “A pragmatic moderate who spent most of her career as a prosecutor, Ms. Harris was seen throughout the vice-presidential search as among the safest choices available to Mr. Biden.”
Breaking News: Sen. Kamala Harris of California is Joe Biden’s pick for vice president. A pragmatic moderate, she is the first Black woman on a major party ticket. https://t.co/Ttvh5RyxUB pic.twitter.com/NMcIz60ckH
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 11, 2020
