From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is Daily.

Today, over the next two days, 20 Democratic candidates for president will take the stage for the first time in the 2020 campaign.

My colleague, Alex Burns, on the two competing visions for America, they'll be fighting over this week and throughout the election.

It's Wednesday, June 26th.

Alex, you've been thinking a lot about the Democratic field ahead of these debates. Tell me exactly what you've been thinking about.

You know, there's one moment over the last few weeks that has really stuck in my mind. Last week at a fundraiser with a bunch of wealthy donors in New York.

Joe Biden told this story about having worked with segregationist senators in the Senate. It really blew up in the race.

Speaking of a fundraiser in New York City Tuesday night, Biden told the crowd this. I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me boy. He always called me son. Herman Talbage, one of the meanest guys I ever knew.

Well, guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn't agree on much of anything, but we got things done.

He took all kinds of heat from his rivals like Cory Booker. I heard from many, many African Americans who found the comments hurtful and Kamala Harris.

To coddle the reputations of segregationists, of people who, if they had their way, I would literally not be standing here as a member of the United States Senate.

It's just, it's misinformed and it's wrong. We're having sort of spoken with nostalgia about the old days of the Senate and the racial implications of that.

But when I read the accounts of that fundraiser, a different moment really stood out to me that I would have expected to blow up a little bit more.

There was a direct quote in his riff that night where he told this room of donors that under his presidency, no one standard of living will change.

Nothing would fundamentally change. You could fix the economy without demonizing the rich, without doing too much to disrupt the lives of the rich.

That seemed like a really stark statement in the context of this democratic primary.

And what specifically about that remark stood out to you?

It stood out to me as such an important organizing statement of the Biden candidacy.

This idea that you can do what needs to be done without blowing up the system, without taking a hatchet to the economic structure of the country.

We tend to think about the divisions within the democratic party. The divisions we're going to see play out on the debate stages this week and next month as ideological as being about the left versus the center.

But in so many ways, it's about something even more basic, which is whether you think the system can be made to work in more or less the form it currently exists or whether you need to blow it up.

And in that moment, Joe Biden said, you work within the system. I'm not going to blow it up.

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