Will Marshall: Where Are the Moderates?

“I don’t see a full, vigorous pivot by this president (and this White House) back toward the themes and approaches that Joe Biden articulated in his 2020 presidential race.”

On June 8th, Merion West editor-in-chief Erich Prince was joined by Will Marshall, who serves as president of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), a centrist Democratic think tank historically associated with the “New Democrats.” In addition to overseeing PPI, Mr. Marshall is an honorary vice president of Policy Network, an international think tank for progressive policy, and he frequently contributes media commentary, having written at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and other newspapers. In their conversation, Mr. Marshall comments on the Democratic Party’s most pressing issues, the public’s current perception of the party, and what he believes Democrats can do in order to regain momentum.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Will, I read your January 2022 Hill op-ed “How Biden can get his presidency back on course.” In that piece, as you recall, you outlined a few concrete proposals that the White House ought to pursue. The first one, as I think all of us these days would agree with today, was inflation. At the time, Senator Joe Manchin, Larry Summers, and a few others on the Democratic side were warning about inflation, but it wasn’t super common [within the party]. And then you also talked about rejecting “cultural leftism.” So I’m wondering now, if you were going to write the same op-ed in June of 2022, would you suggest those same points, or how you would rate the White House’s progress—or probably lack of progress—on following these points that you articulated?

We were worried about inflation back in January because we didn’t think it was going away. There was a view in the White House that it was a transitory phenomenon, and that once we sorted out our supply chain problems and companies started to respond to surging demand, things would level off, but they didn’t. And I think we’ve argued, along with people like Larry Summers, that it’s clear in retrospect that we overstimulated the economy. It was the COVID-19 relief measures story before Biden got into office; then, there was the big relief bill he did last year. And, at the time, we were still talking about a big reconciliation bill; it was going to be very expensive, arguably not really paid for, and therefore inflationary in its impact. And so it was clear that Americans were really beginning to worry about rising prices or eating away at their purchasing power. We didn’t think that the White House was taking the problem seriously enough.