evidence: The incident illustrates one of the reasons that Biden has proved such an elusive target. Despite embracing an agenda that is further to the left than that of any Democratic nominee in decades, he’s avoided the specific policy proposals and catchphrases that Republicans find easiest to attack. As a result, he appears more centrist than he actually is. In Biden, Democrats have a nominee who is promising FDR-style change, yet is avoiding the political backlash that an ambitious progressive agenda often brings. [...] The other reason voters perceive Biden as moderate is that on issue after issue, he’s adopted policies that are strikingly progressive while stopping just shy of the specific formulations that might leave him vulnerable to Republican attack. On criminal justice, for instance, Biden has proposed abolishing cash bail and mandatory minimum sentences, and creating a national roster of police officers who abuse their position—all policies that place him to the left of the 2016 Democratic platform. But, to Trump’s dismay, he hasn’t proposed defunding the police. [...] By repeatedly stopping short of the left’s most ambitious—and most politically incendiary—proposals, Biden has created an agenda that is less progressive than Sanders’s or Warren’s would have been. (On foreign policy, the contrast between Biden and Sanders is even greater.) But as Waleed Shahid, the communications director for Justice Democrats, told Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, Biden is still running on "the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in the modern history of the party."