Left-wing Democrats are pleased with Biden.

The American public isn't.

Robert Kuttner is a left-wing Democrat, par excellence . He’s the co-founder and current co-editor of The American Prospect, which was created in 1990.

Kuttner co-founded that publication, in his words, “to be a bulwark against the drift to the right and a beacon for practical progressive politics.” In his view, “the Democrats had lost their way as champions of working families and regulators of capitalism.” In short, the Democrats weren’t sufficiently left-wing.

Success in reversing the “drift” has been hard to come by. Kuttner apparently believes that Bill Clinton and even Barack Obama “embraced far too much of the neoliberal recipe and cozied up to Wall Street.”

But now, at long last, Kuttner and his fellow leftists have a president who satisfies them. Of that president, he writes: “Biden, as a far more progressive president than we anticipated, has been an affirmation for American Prospect values and politics.”

Kuttner expresses delight that “the founders of this magazine have lived to see a time when our ideas have had a major influence on national policy” and that, in the Biden administration, “people who have been part of the Prospect family are now helping to make national policy.” His only reservation is Biden’s age, which Kuttner fears will prevent his reelection if he faces a Republican other than Donald Trump.

Kuttner is right to be pleased with Biden administration policies and personal. It’s difficult to think of any area of domestic policy in which Biden has stood up to the hard left.

Where Kuttner goes astray, I think, is in his analysis of why Biden, a former “neo-liberal,” has conformed so closely with “American Prospect values and politics.” Kuttner offers two causes: (1) the pandemic and (2) a shift in public opinion in favor of leftist policies.

The pandemic led to bipartisan spending measures, to be sure. But nothing about the pandemic dictated that Biden back the $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” legislation or issue any of his radical executive orders.

As for the alleged shift in public opinion, the public never supported the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending spree. Nor, for that matter, does the public support Biden himself. His approval rating is embarrassingly low. It would be higher if Biden governed as the center-left figure he presented himself to the public as in 2020.

Kuttner attributes Biden’s bad numbers to his age. But Biden’s numbers were good when he took office at the age of 78. They began falling when he criminally botched the Afghanistan withdrawal and continued to sink as inflation soared and Biden’s leftism became more-and-more apparent.

The Joe Biden the American public thought it was electing is the center-left Joe Biden Kuttner and company feared. The Joe Biden the public actually elected is the one who, in Kuttner’s words, is “a far more progressive president than we anticipated.”

It’s easier to refute Kuttner’s explanations for why Biden has governed as a hard leftist than to present one’s own persuasive reasons. My explanation is that Biden swims with the tide of elite Democrat opinion.

In his brilliant new book Only the Strong, Sen. Tom Cotton invokes this view of Biden to explain his shifts on foreign policy — from post-Vietnam foe of exercising American power, to tough talking, hawkish war on terrorism interventionist, and back to something like his original dovish stance. I think the explanation applies to Biden’s domestic policy shifts as well.

The tide of elite Democratic opinion has moved sharply leftward — Kuttner is right about that. It’s less clear that the tide has shifted very much when it comes to rank-and-file Dems. If it had, the Democrats probably would have nominated Bernie Sanders, not Biden, in 2020.

In any case, it’s clear that American public opinion doesn’t reflect Kuttner’s policy preferences and values, to which Biden adheres. If it did, voters wouldn’t have given Republicans a majority in the House; allowed the GOP to retain all but one of the 21 Senate seats it was defending this year; and, in the process, told pollsters they disapprove of Biden by a wide margin.

Joe Biden is pleasing the American left, but not the American people