President Joe Biden, when describing the wacky and extreme element of the modern GOP, has long leaned on a simple phrase: “This isn’t your father’s Republican Party.”
His State of the Union address, delivered Tuesday night, had a slightly different message, this time about his side of the aisle: “This isn’t your father’s Democratic Party. It’s your grandfather’s.”
If President Bill Clinton used his 1996 State of the Union speech to declare the end of the era of big government and President Barack Obama used his to endorse “bipartisan” changes to Social Security and a controversial free trade pact with Pacific Rim nations, Biden used his speech to declare the return of the old populist Democratic Party, explicitly aligned with the middle class and willing to call out entrenched economic power.
The speech did not represent a turn to either the center or the left, a full-on commitment to bipartisanship or an announcement that he would rely on executive action….
