A series of odd news cycles followed the end of the Democratic primaries, running right up until this month’s DNC. The most conservative politician, at least among the field’s viable candidates, had won the race and, in doing so, had directly repudiated an effort to realign the party and compel it to embrace a transformative policy agenda. For reasons that remain difficult to discern, many liberal pundits and commentators seemed to react otherwise: effusively speculating that Joe Biden, having spent more than four decades triangulating to the right, might actually be the progressive tribune America’s liberals had been waiting for.

Biden was no Bernie Sanders, but his proposals — or so the theory went — eclipsed anything that had appeared on a Democratic presidential platform before in the scope of their ambition. And besides, the recommendations that had emerged from a joint Biden-Sanders “Unity Task Force” (co-chaired by none other than New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) clearly showed the former to be a canny pragmatist willing to cede some ideological ground to the party’s progressive wing.

His history, record, and public statements notwithstanding, Biden has offered up plenty of evidence to suggest he’s not the crypto-left-winger or modern-day FDR parts of America’s liberal media brain trust have reflexively asserted: appointing neoliberal economist Larry Summers, raising unfathomable sums of money from financial interests, pivoting rightward with law and order campaign ads, pledging to fix the culture of corporate America by way of “nonlegislative” (i.e., nonexistent) action, and making the typical gestures centrist Democrats favor when engaged in their traditional election season pitch to conservative-leaning suburbanites.