Why Is Biden Exceeding Expectations as a Progressive President?

Scott Lemieux makes the following observation explaining why Joe Biden has been a much, much better president than many progressives had predicted:

For those of us who lived through the 90s, pragmatism on the part of prominent Democrats was inherently suspect because it was generally used to justify feints to the right, sometimes plausibly rooted in public opinion but other times much more rooted in elite prejudices. For Biden, though, having a sense of public opinion isn’t just a pretext for moving to the right — sometimes it means sensing that the public is with you and going to be more with you and acting accordingly. 

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Biden’s value as a president was going to be heavily context dependent — but, then, if LBJ had magically become president in 1952 or 1992 nobody would remember him as a great liberal on domestic policy either.

I don't disagree with this, but I'll add to it: Biden a good progressive president because he's a consummate party man in a situation where the Democratic Party has institutionally moved in a substantially progressive direction.

When I talked about what I liked about Biden back in the 2020 primary, one area I ranked him highly on is on the "staff positions with good people" metric, and that is part of this. Biden understands very well where the political center of gravity is both nationally and within the Democratic coalition, and acts accordingly. He is going to surround himself with smart, capable individuals who are roughly aligned with median Democratic Party opinion.  And under circumstances where the Democratic center of gravity is in a generally progressive place -- neither captured by bomb-throwing extremists nor slavishly adherent to chin-stroking centrism -- that's a recipe for happy outcomes for progressives.