The quiet radicalism of Joe Biden’s presidency

President Joe Biden announced the long-expected today: He is running for a second term in office. Joined by Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate, his fourth presidential campaign may be another unconventional and unorthodox campaign against former President Donald Trump — if Trump succeeds in beating a field of Republican challengers.

Biden and Harris’s announcement came in the form of a video posted Tuesday morning. “Personal freedom is fundamental to who we are as Americans. That’s been the work of my first term — to fight for our democracy, to protect our rights, to make sure that everyone in this country is treated equally, and that everyone is given a fair shot at making it,” Biden says, signaling what will be the key themes of their campaign: “The question we’re facing is whether in the years ahead, we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer.” Talking about his bipartisan accomplishments contrasts “extremist” Republicans with the Democrats trying to “protect” Americans, and pushing an optimistic forward-looking agenda.

Those messages hark back to the pitch Biden made four years ago, when his party was facing an identity crisis and competing theories for Democrats’ future. Since then, he has evolved as a Democrat — no longer the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt that he pitched himself as in 2020, nor the centrist who ran with Barack Obama in 2008, but a liberal incrementalist forced to work with the slimmest congressional mandate.