“The Biden team made a really genuine effort to reach out to the left on a whole range of issues, including on foreign policy,” Matt Duss, who serves as foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), told The Daily Beast in an interview. “They understood this helped them to win and now I think they understand that it can help them govern.”

Top progressives close to Sanders and others in the party’s left flank, as they tell it, are not praising Biden’s first personnel installments because they expect them to enact grassroots-oriented changes in the way Sanders would hope to. By nature of being closely aligned with Biden, they are largely institutionalists, too…

“What’s very interesting about the picks that have been made so far is you can basically describe them as job promotions for people who have been in the job just underneath that for a number of years,” said Joel Rubin, who was Sanders’ Jewish outreach director during his 2020 campaign and a senior State Department official under Obama (and periodic Daily Beast contributor).

“There’s no jaggedness or newness in the spheres that they will be responsible for in the sense of a new human who comes in and is just totally distinct from anything that was there beforehand. In many ways, there’s a familiarity that enables more confidence from the get go.”