"The Product of a Completely Different World Than the Ivy League Meritocracy That Has Taken Over the Democratic Party"

"Catering to society's well-educated winners is no way to run a party of the left: Biden seems to be one of the few mainstream Democrats to have grasped this. He recalled in the interview being told by a Hillary Clinton operative in 2016 that he 'had to make a distinction between progressive values and working-class values'.
"'I said I've never found a distinction,' Biden claimed he replied. 'Never found them hard to sell.' He told the Times about white working-class enthusiasm for gender wage equality and some other issues, and then he took this shot at the very heart of modern-day liberalism: 'We treat them like they're stupid. They know they're in trouble, and nobody's talking to them. Nobody's talking to them. That's what we used to do. That was our base.'"

Thomas Frank at The Guardian explains "Joe Biden's mystique."