Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast.

I'm your host Sarah Isger joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg and David French.

Quite the lineup today.

Biden's inauguration one year later, what we've learned about the first year of his presidency.

And new Gallup numbers showing the largest swing in party identification since Gallup started measuring in 1991.

And lastly, of course, Russia's continued aggression on the Ukrainian border and how it is likely to resolve.

Let's dive right in.

Steve, we're one year exactly into the Biden presidency.

He ran.

He won the nomination.

On being the more centrist candidate, on bipartisanship, on finding common ground, his inauguration speech touted it over and over again.

And yet, for the last six months at least, we've seen him take the opposite tact, really talking to his base, the left as the party shifts further and further to the left.

Why the change?

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think if you look back on this first year, you can only describe it as disappointing and difficult for Joe Biden.

And I think the reason he's had so much difficulty or among the reasons he said so much difficulty or the decisions that he himself has made the way that he's handled problems that have been presented him.

Look, I think the shorthand of this, we're starting to see kind of the jelling of conventional wisdom inside the Beltway Conventional Wisdom that Biden ran against Bernie Sanders.

He was the moderate and he's just become not a moderate in office.

And like all cliches, I think there's some truth to that.

I think however, if you look back at the campaign in greater detail, it's a little more complicated than that, but it does not absolve Joe Biden.

If you look at the way that Biden ran, it's true that particularly at the end of the fight to win the Democratic nomination, he was facing Bernie Sanders.

And he did present himself as a contrast to Bernie Sanders and his sort of quasi-socialism.

It was interesting to look back at that, the Democratic establishment types at the time who thought Bernie Sanders nomination was inevitable, who started to get pretty comfortable sort of embracing and amplifying Sanders' arguments.

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