Biden’s boring campaign is the comfort food many Dem voters want

Biden’s strategy is so conventional that it can look boring, particularly for journalists like myself who have a professional bias toward things that are new and different, and it looks the same to an activist base trying to shake up the status quo. But Biden’s uncreative approach looks like something else to those Democrats most desperate to defeat Donald Trump: comforting.

Biden, after all, isn’t promising a political revolution, as Bernie Sanders is, or proposing to fundamentally reshape the system like Elizabeth Warren is. He wouldn’t make history as the first female president, like Warren or Kamala Harris, or the first openly gay one, like Pete Buttigieg. He does not support Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, either of which would radically alter swaths of the U.S. economy. Likewise, Biden isn’t telling voters that he’s found a way to harness small-donor funding and resist the pressures of wealthy donors, nor is he plotting a new path to Electoral College victory. Instead, Biden is offering Democrats a generous serving of familiar (and forgiving) comfort food—and so far a whole bunch of them are eating it up.