Though his presidency is in its infancy, Joe Biden appears to have brought to an end to the primary governing theory for the past 30 years of Democratic presidential politics. The days of triangulation are over…

Democrats who lived through the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama years probably feel like they’re staring into a political funhouse mirror. The prime lesson Democrats took from the Reagan years was that being caricatured by conservatives as a tax-and-spend liberal was a form of political immolation. Now Biden, a man whose formative Senate years were spent under Reagan, is in the White House and he seems not the least bit bothered by the threat.

“He’s nice and low key and basically saying, if you don’t want to cooperate then we’ll run you over,” is how Howard Dean put it to Nightly. “But he’s doing it in a nice language. … He’s smiling while he steamrolls.”