I think there is another reason why Biden so often remained silent and refused to lead: He knew his party was divided on most issues, and he was committed, first and foremost, to holding together the Democratic coalition that he had inherited. He feared that any bold position he took might alienate some faction of the party, so he did his best to avoid being seen taking bold positions. When he did anything bold, he tried to keep it on the DL in order to avoid having to publicly defend it.
Why was Trump able to push the ceasefire deal over the line whereas Biden couldn't?
This is so easy to answer.
Because ultimately the veto was with Bibi. And there was no way a Democratic President could get Bibi to do something he didn't want to, because of the blowback from Trump and the right would be too destructive for Biden.
So why was Trump able to do it? Because he had nothing to fear from the right or the Republican party.
It has nothing to with Biden not being confrontational enough. It simply has to do with the international and domestic configuration of forces.
I agree about Biden, but let's be very clear. The entire Dem leadership are responsible for allowing the genocide. We, and I speak as a Democrat and a "self-professed" progressive, though also a Bulwark supporter, utterly failed to act boldly and courageously to stop the genocide, and we paid the price. I worked the polls in a very Dem district, and hardly anyone showed up for evening rush. Our own voters failed to show up, and they were absolutely right. The tragedy is we allowed Trump to win, and we surely deserved to lose. Chuck Schumer is my senator, and Hakeem Jeffries my congressman, and I have watched his career for some time. I will be asking them both to take responsibility and resign their leadership posts, and do some serious soul searching, as I certainly am. Only bold leaders with the courage of their convictions are acceptable in the future. We too must renew our party completely from the ground up. We can no longer just blame the other mad tea party; we too are responsible for the mess we are in. All of us.
Guy trolls me several levels deep about how great Biden was, then poof! vanishes after sending and then deleting this ...
--
Bahhahahahahahahha You know what, I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that we just very much disagreed on Biden's legacy. I was giving emotional responses, so okay fair enough with some of your challenges. And with that you just showed you have zero good faith and no understanding how anything works or interest in learning. Mussolini? Seriously? That comparison is so laughable I won't even respond to it directly. And he sold his soul? Cool beans dude. That's a weird way to say he was focused on bipartisan legislation that benefitted US Citizens, something people claim they want. You can claim he was ineffective in the broader issue of democracy (and fairly so!), but since you haven't once mentioned the responsibility of Republicans and seem fixated on Biden alone, I guess it is you who believe him to be a real savior. And he let you down. Oopsie! Best of luck with that. And have a nice day. :)
--
> Bahhahahahahahahha
Really?
> I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that we just very much disagreed on Biden's legacy.
I'm willing to let you have your opinion too, still.
> And with that you just showed you have zero good faith and no understanding how anything works or interest in learning.
A personal attack from someone who cancels himself.
> Mussolini? Seriously? That comparison is so laughable I won't even respond to it directly.
Yeah, Andy K., I noticed . The point with Mussolini is that he is thought to have done well in governing to get the trains to run on time, but his failures over-rode that. It's an exaggeration, for sure, but it is not in bad-faith. Likewise whatever Biden did well, he did not see or counter the danger of Trump, so it is cancelled. Legacy undone!
Trump just revoked John Bolton's security clearance, effectively putting him on notice that he better shut up or he will be legally pursued.
Dictator on day 1, indeed.
My point with the good stuff Joe Biden did, and that is not in doubt though I believe it only scratched the surface, but moreover is that while he worked on all this positive legislation, he did nothing to fulfull his Constitutional duty to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all threats, both foreign and DOMESTIC - all for nothing.
To ME, in MY OPINION, that over-rides the good he did because it is being deconstructed piece by piece, and pretty darn quick.
That is what I think right now. I have no problem with others who might feel different, but the whole country is in a pickle now with no recourse while a techno-tyranny noose is tightened.
I did all that was in my very limited power to do to support Biden: I voted for him in 2020.
Biden was a significantly impaired public speaker. Congratulations are in order for having overcome his stutter. Many people overcame polio too, but that doesn't mean all of them were ideally suited for track and field events. Not having paid attention to Biden until 2019, I don't know what the younger Biden sounded like. To be uncharitable, which is how presidents are evaluated, president Biden sounded to me like he was half in the bag even though he was certainly as sober as a proverbial judge. The man could not e n u n c i a t e to save his life. It was excruciating to listen to him even when he wasn't getting the names of countries and world leaders mixed up. I shudder to think what a confrontational president Biden would have sounded like.
Well said. When I consider how well AI works over on Twitter, it is very clear with massive compute our Tech-soon-to-be-trillionaires can finger and nail any of us they want. That is no lie or exaggeration.
I am flabberghasted at how accurate GROK on Twitter is in characterizing and contextualizing pretty much any comment. Go and try it.
America was about to have it's 250th birthday next year, but weak-link Biden ruined that.
And now the very people who have worked against government of, by and for the people are saying "I told you so" and are happy to step in and replace it.
If Americans want to oppose that, we have to do it in the open, surveilled and threat-assessed on social media platforms.
Does anyone know the phrase "Let 1000 flowers bloom"?
It originates from a campaign in the People's Republic of China in 1956-1957, launched by Mao Zedong. Officially called the "Hundred Flowers Campaign," it encouraged intellectuals to voice their opinions and criticisms of government policies, under the slogan which was meant to signify a flourishing of diverse ideas and cultural expressions.
The phrase was used to advocate for diversity in thought, creativity, or innovation, suggesting that allowing a wide variety of ideas to flourish can lead to beneficial outcomes. Do you think Trump and thugs subscribe to that?
This campaign is analogous to our Internet dicussion boards where many who spoke out were later persecuted.
China programmed children to speak against their parents, but now we have the Internet permanent comments used. We don't need that now, we have permanent surveillance of all of us and our comments and actions throughout our lives.
I know it sounds crazy… but, what if Trump would have been successful in 2020? Stayed as president. At that time he didn’t gain his power until after 2022. By that time they would have seen what a disaster he was. The economy tanked. And people would finally see the light. As he would have been in two terms and people would actually see the Trump economy. I admire, and respect President Biden what he did bringing the economy back. But I said it in 2020. Democracy was more important than anything else. I don’t know I’m just speculating. Biden was from a different age. It’s a different politics. We needed to play fire with fire. Sorry, I know I’m going to get a lashing. But, maybe we were better with him as he didn’t become the all powerful till later.
Well, here's my takeaway... kind of a question in search of an answer. It seems to me that all the good things Biden did just slid right off, while the mistakes he made stuck to him like glue. On the other hand, the opposite seems to have happened with Trump. This is so odd to me that I have to wonder if Americans now simply prefer a president with Trump's personality. Kind of a depressing thought.
Thank Fox, OANN, Newsmax, WSJ, etc etc. You know the saying "a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its pants on". That is what moderate voters have to face. And now it is tiktok, x and meta who will espouse "GQP truths". I honestly don't know how voters of our persuasion can counter that. It certainly didn't help that Biden was not (able) to be out there countering all the conservative lies and over-the-top social issue wars.
In the back of my mind I leave room for the theory that the techno-plutocrats rigged all of this, or our media misled an entire nation into tyranny. I have a hard time believing this is true.
I think Biden did a fine job. One of the best President's in my lifetime. But he couldn't do everything. He had an incredibly difficult opposition party. He had an ex President spreading lies about him. He was old, and he had a corrupt supreme court. He brought the economy back from Covid, when it could easily have taken a nose dive. He got several important laws passed, he helped our allies. He traveled around the world connecting with world leaders. He went to Israel the day after the horrible massacre. Give him a break. The complaint I have is he should have announced after the midterms that he wasn't running again and then a candidate that could beat could have been run against Trump.
There is a reason why Biden failed in past runs for the White House. Voters judged him poor in 'Presidential timber'. He was way too 'beltway'. I remember when he ran against Obama in the primaries and got absolutely smoked. He kept reminding people how many years on the 'foreign relations' com he had. Voters yawned and Biden got the boot not knowing what hit him. If it wasn't for Trump and a Dem convention hungry for a centrist candidate who could beat Trump, Biden would have never won.
Nate Silver nailed it "Biden, an ordinary man in extraordinary times. If you simulated the world 1000 times with slightly different initial conditions, I’m convinced that both Barack Obama and Trump would become president fairly often — whatever you think of them, they have self some self-evident star talent. Biden is the political equivalent of what in poker we’d call a “grinder.” He’s been at the same casino every day for decades, playing in the same low-to-mid-stakes game. Like any grinder, he’s occasionally crotchety, sometimes complaining about the increase in parking prices or the broken soda machine. But he’s affable enough — he knows everyone and is a good reader of people on and off the tables. And at these stakes, he’s a solid, winning player. But when he’s tried to take shots at bigger games, it hasn’t gone well. Moreover, he’s now well into his seventies and well past peak form.
Then you turn on the TV one day, and this grinder from your $2/$5 game improbably has a huge stack of chips in the World Series of Poker. The truth is, he’s been lucky to get there, blessed by the deck and winning nearly every all-in for a week straight. But he comes to precisely the opposite conclusion: that after a lifetime of bad breaks and being underestimated, he’s finally getting the results he deserved all along. He’s badly overplaying hands, making heroic calls and raises, especially toward the end of the day once the fatigue sets in. Before you have time to text your buddies from the cardroom to turn on and watch the show, he’s busted out."
Biden had ONE job which he was elected for....,NO MORE TRUMP. Instead he tried to be FDR 2.0, and voters rejected that.
Nailed it! But did Biden really try to be FDR? Not even FDR-Lite. He never even talked about the problems facing the country until a day before he was kicked out ... the oligarchy. He did like what all of our Democratic Presidents since Ronald Reagan have done, participated in normalizing and allowing the toxic Republicans to take over the party and now the country - without a fucking word in opposition.
I'd actually disagree about 2008. That's the one time I felt Biden had it all together as a candidate: experienced enough to warrant respect, still cognitively on point, and as such, capable of communicating effectively with voters, when given a little time for a stump speech. He just never gained any traction in that primary, because Obama was a comet and Clinton...well, was a Clinton. This, of course, does not mean he would've been an effective President from 2008-2016, just that he was a better candidate than people gave him credit for. And this happens in crowded primaries all the time.
By even the latter half of his vice-presidency, it was very clear he had slowed down. I am not sure he could've ever gotten on a major ticket again in normal circumstances, but 2020 ended up being exactly the right environment for him, as Silver alludes to.
Biden never used the Bully Pulpit, and that is all Trump uses. Dems never use it, except for DEI and Trans issues, which are losing issues. And that's why Kamala lost to a thrice-married adulterer, convicted felon, and narcissistic sociopath.
Evaluations of a Presidency in the long run often linger on a few bullet points of judgment, as many of us don't have the time to delve into 700-page examinations of all the crises and sucesses/failures one encounters in those 4-8 years.
My guess is Biden will be judged on the following 5 issues...and spoiler alert, none of them have anything to do with BBB and Chips. These will be so forgotten in 50 yrs that they won't even elicit footnotes.
I'll link 1 and 2 together, as while they're different, they're inextricably linked...
#1 and #2: Biden's late departure from the Race and his Inability to ensure Trump would not return. Historically, we will criticize #1 as a product of hubris on the part of Biden. I have the contrarian view that Biden's cognitive limitations obscured his own insight into his electoral vulnerability (think abt your elderly parent who insists that their driving is adequate) and put more blame here on his advisors who didn't twist his arm, but historians will likely highlight hubris. Secondly, the preeminent crisis of Biden's Presidency will be whether or not he wounded - or better, killed - Trumpism. This will be most naturally evaluated on whether or not his first 4 yrs concluded with Napoleon returning from Elba...sorry, Trump returning from Mar a Lago. Obviously, mission failed.
#3: Ukraine: Fair or not, in 50 yrs, we will look at Russia's eventual success in Ukraine (ie getting away with an upcoming deal that will be ridiculously favorable to Russia), as a black mark on Trump, but also one impugning Biden's inability to finish things off before 2025. While it may be ridiculous, I anticipiate there will be historical shaming of Biden for not doing enough in 2022-24 to equip Ukraine with the materiel might to force a Russian withdrawal prior to Trump's return.
#4: Inability to read the Tea leaves on the Economy: Harris's defeat will be pinned on a failure of Biden's admin to understand that most barometers of the economy they cited to tout their success (stock market, low unemployment), failed to illuminate that people simply worried too much about what fraction of their budget was going to rent and groceries. Historians will castigate Biden for telling the American people the economy was great when they were feeling constant budget constraint. This is reductionist, I know, but that's how it'll go.
#5: Afghanistan: This one is weird, as I feel it had no importance w/ respect to Trump's victory at all. I honestly suspect there are truly less than 10,000 Americans who voted for Trump, but would've voted for Harris had the conculsion to Afghanistan gone differently. Nevertheless, historians love when approval ratings tell a narrative. And Biden's resultant dip following the pull-out, and more importantly, his inability to ever tread water again, will be a long-cited inflection point in his Presidency, when the historians get invovled.
All good points... I will just add this thought: I honestly don't think ANY Dem president could have killed 'Trumpism'. Not ANYONE! Not in today's media climate. Example: my elderly father watches about an hour of Fox News per day. He voted for Trump but thinks he is a terrible person. And yet, what did he say when I brought up Liz Cheney? "I don't like her." He couldn't even explain why. He's been brainwashed by Fox News. The constant and growing flood of mis- and disinformation is keeping Trumpism alive.
I never liked Biden and I have actually met him too! How did the democrats get talked into believing that Biden was the only person out of all Americans over 35 to be able to beat Trump?
He has been too cautious and timid, too quiet about his accomplishments, and way too kind to the states that raged the most against him. He might have made good moves with Covid, and attempted to do something about climate change, but his position on Gaza was despicable.
As far as Trump goes, we really need to get him out of our heads. We have allowed him to take up far more of our attention that is healthy.
Republicans can do anything. The opposition to them cannot be merely human, it has to be infallible, perfect and omniscient. Their character has to be better than any saint of the Catholic Church ever aspired to, let alone happened to be. Until that happens, the opposition is going to devour itself, or execute circular firing squads or whatever.
This is a ridiculous standard to have, and highlights that the descent into idiocy is not entirely on one side.
I think there is another reason why Biden so often remained silent and refused to lead: He knew his party was divided on most issues, and he was committed, first and foremost, to holding together the Democratic coalition that he had inherited. He feared that any bold position he took might alienate some faction of the party, so he did his best to avoid being seen taking bold positions. When he did anything bold, he tried to keep it on the DL in order to avoid having to publicly defend it.
Why was Trump able to push the ceasefire deal over the line whereas Biden couldn't?
This is so easy to answer.
Because ultimately the veto was with Bibi. And there was no way a Democratic President could get Bibi to do something he didn't want to, because of the blowback from Trump and the right would be too destructive for Biden.
So why was Trump able to do it? Because he had nothing to fear from the right or the Republican party.
It has nothing to with Biden not being confrontational enough. It simply has to do with the international and domestic configuration of forces.
I agree about Biden, but let's be very clear. The entire Dem leadership are responsible for allowing the genocide. We, and I speak as a Democrat and a "self-professed" progressive, though also a Bulwark supporter, utterly failed to act boldly and courageously to stop the genocide, and we paid the price. I worked the polls in a very Dem district, and hardly anyone showed up for evening rush. Our own voters failed to show up, and they were absolutely right. The tragedy is we allowed Trump to win, and we surely deserved to lose. Chuck Schumer is my senator, and Hakeem Jeffries my congressman, and I have watched his career for some time. I will be asking them both to take responsibility and resign their leadership posts, and do some serious soul searching, as I certainly am. Only bold leaders with the courage of their convictions are acceptable in the future. We too must renew our party completely from the ground up. We can no longer just blame the other mad tea party; we too are responsible for the mess we are in. All of us.
Biden gave us Garland and Biden and Garland both gave us Trump 2.0.
THAT will be his and Garland's legacy.
I'm S I C K over it. Physically sick.
Oh, yoo-hoo, Andy K. ... where did you go?
Guy trolls me several levels deep about how great Biden was, then poof! vanishes after sending and then deleting this ...
--
Bahhahahahahahahha You know what, I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that we just very much disagreed on Biden's legacy. I was giving emotional responses, so okay fair enough with some of your challenges. And with that you just showed you have zero good faith and no understanding how anything works or interest in learning. Mussolini? Seriously? That comparison is so laughable I won't even respond to it directly. And he sold his soul? Cool beans dude. That's a weird way to say he was focused on bipartisan legislation that benefitted US Citizens, something people claim they want. You can claim he was ineffective in the broader issue of democracy (and fairly so!), but since you haven't once mentioned the responsibility of Republicans and seem fixated on Biden alone, I guess it is you who believe him to be a real savior. And he let you down. Oopsie! Best of luck with that. And have a nice day. :)
--
> Bahhahahahahahahha
Really?
> I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that we just very much disagreed on Biden's legacy.
I'm willing to let you have your opinion too, still.
> And with that you just showed you have zero good faith and no understanding how anything works or interest in learning.
A personal attack from someone who cancels himself.
> Mussolini? Seriously? That comparison is so laughable I won't even respond to it directly.
Yeah, Andy K., I noticed . The point with Mussolini is that he is thought to have done well in governing to get the trains to run on time, but his failures over-rode that. It's an exaggeration, for sure, but it is not in bad-faith. Likewise whatever Biden did well, he did not see or counter the danger of Trump, so it is cancelled. Legacy undone!
Trump just revoked John Bolton's security clearance, effectively putting him on notice that he better shut up or he will be legally pursued.
Dictator on day 1, indeed.
My point with the good stuff Joe Biden did, and that is not in doubt though I believe it only scratched the surface, but moreover is that while he worked on all this positive legislation, he did nothing to fulfull his Constitutional duty to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all threats, both foreign and DOMESTIC - all for nothing.
To ME, in MY OPINION, that over-rides the good he did because it is being deconstructed piece by piece, and pretty darn quick.
That is what I think right now. I have no problem with others who might feel different, but the whole country is in a pickle now with no recourse while a techno-tyranny noose is tightened.
I did all that was in my very limited power to do to support Biden: I voted for him in 2020.
Biden was a significantly impaired public speaker. Congratulations are in order for having overcome his stutter. Many people overcame polio too, but that doesn't mean all of them were ideally suited for track and field events. Not having paid attention to Biden until 2019, I don't know what the younger Biden sounded like. To be uncharitable, which is how presidents are evaluated, president Biden sounded to me like he was half in the bag even though he was certainly as sober as a proverbial judge. The man could not e n u n c i a t e to save his life. It was excruciating to listen to him even when he wasn't getting the names of countries and world leaders mixed up. I shudder to think what a confrontational president Biden would have sounded like.
Well said. When I consider how well AI works over on Twitter, it is very clear with massive compute our Tech-soon-to-be-trillionaires can finger and nail any of us they want. That is no lie or exaggeration.
I am flabberghasted at how accurate GROK on Twitter is in characterizing and contextualizing pretty much any comment. Go and try it.
America was about to have it's 250th birthday next year, but weak-link Biden ruined that.
And now the very people who have worked against government of, by and for the people are saying "I told you so" and are happy to step in and replace it.
If Americans want to oppose that, we have to do it in the open, surveilled and threat-assessed on social media platforms.
Does anyone know the phrase "Let 1000 flowers bloom"?
It originates from a campaign in the People's Republic of China in 1956-1957, launched by Mao Zedong. Officially called the "Hundred Flowers Campaign," it encouraged intellectuals to voice their opinions and criticisms of government policies, under the slogan which was meant to signify a flourishing of diverse ideas and cultural expressions.
The phrase was used to advocate for diversity in thought, creativity, or innovation, suggesting that allowing a wide variety of ideas to flourish can lead to beneficial outcomes. Do you think Trump and thugs subscribe to that?
This campaign is analogous to our Internet dicussion boards where many who spoke out were later persecuted.
China programmed children to speak against their parents, but now we have the Internet permanent comments used. We don't need that now, we have permanent surveillance of all of us and our comments and actions throughout our lives.
I know it sounds crazy… but, what if Trump would have been successful in 2020? Stayed as president. At that time he didn’t gain his power until after 2022. By that time they would have seen what a disaster he was. The economy tanked. And people would finally see the light. As he would have been in two terms and people would actually see the Trump economy. I admire, and respect President Biden what he did bringing the economy back. But I said it in 2020. Democracy was more important than anything else. I don’t know I’m just speculating. Biden was from a different age. It’s a different politics. We needed to play fire with fire. Sorry, I know I’m going to get a lashing. But, maybe we were better with him as he didn’t become the all powerful till later.
Well, here's my takeaway... kind of a question in search of an answer. It seems to me that all the good things Biden did just slid right off, while the mistakes he made stuck to him like glue. On the other hand, the opposite seems to have happened with Trump. This is so odd to me that I have to wonder if Americans now simply prefer a president with Trump's personality. Kind of a depressing thought.
Thank Fox, OANN, Newsmax, WSJ, etc etc. You know the saying "a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its pants on". That is what moderate voters have to face. And now it is tiktok, x and meta who will espouse "GQP truths". I honestly don't know how voters of our persuasion can counter that. It certainly didn't help that Biden was not (able) to be out there countering all the conservative lies and over-the-top social issue wars.
In the back of my mind I leave room for the theory that the techno-plutocrats rigged all of this, or our media misled an entire nation into tyranny. I have a hard time believing this is true.
I think Biden did a fine job. One of the best President's in my lifetime. But he couldn't do everything. He had an incredibly difficult opposition party. He had an ex President spreading lies about him. He was old, and he had a corrupt supreme court. He brought the economy back from Covid, when it could easily have taken a nose dive. He got several important laws passed, he helped our allies. He traveled around the world connecting with world leaders. He went to Israel the day after the horrible massacre. Give him a break. The complaint I have is he should have announced after the midterms that he wasn't running again and then a candidate that could beat could have been run against Trump.
There is a reason why Biden failed in past runs for the White House. Voters judged him poor in 'Presidential timber'. He was way too 'beltway'. I remember when he ran against Obama in the primaries and got absolutely smoked. He kept reminding people how many years on the 'foreign relations' com he had. Voters yawned and Biden got the boot not knowing what hit him. If it wasn't for Trump and a Dem convention hungry for a centrist candidate who could beat Trump, Biden would have never won.
Nate Silver nailed it "Biden, an ordinary man in extraordinary times. If you simulated the world 1000 times with slightly different initial conditions, I’m convinced that both Barack Obama and Trump would become president fairly often — whatever you think of them, they have self some self-evident star talent. Biden is the political equivalent of what in poker we’d call a “grinder.” He’s been at the same casino every day for decades, playing in the same low-to-mid-stakes game. Like any grinder, he’s occasionally crotchety, sometimes complaining about the increase in parking prices or the broken soda machine. But he’s affable enough — he knows everyone and is a good reader of people on and off the tables. And at these stakes, he’s a solid, winning player. But when he’s tried to take shots at bigger games, it hasn’t gone well. Moreover, he’s now well into his seventies and well past peak form.
Then you turn on the TV one day, and this grinder from your $2/$5 game improbably has a huge stack of chips in the World Series of Poker. The truth is, he’s been lucky to get there, blessed by the deck and winning nearly every all-in for a week straight. But he comes to precisely the opposite conclusion: that after a lifetime of bad breaks and being underestimated, he’s finally getting the results he deserved all along. He’s badly overplaying hands, making heroic calls and raises, especially toward the end of the day once the fatigue sets in. Before you have time to text your buddies from the cardroom to turn on and watch the show, he’s busted out."
Biden had ONE job which he was elected for....,NO MORE TRUMP. Instead he tried to be FDR 2.0, and voters rejected that.
Nailed it! But did Biden really try to be FDR? Not even FDR-Lite. He never even talked about the problems facing the country until a day before he was kicked out ... the oligarchy. He did like what all of our Democratic Presidents since Ronald Reagan have done, participated in normalizing and allowing the toxic Republicans to take over the party and now the country - without a fucking word in opposition.
A lot of really good points here, and your 'grinder' example is genius. I do think, though, that at this point we desperately NEED an FDR 2.0!
we need a Bill Clinton.....
Like a hole in the head.
we need 'A' bill cliinton type... centrist, battleground gov state. Josh or Andy B.
I'd actually disagree about 2008. That's the one time I felt Biden had it all together as a candidate: experienced enough to warrant respect, still cognitively on point, and as such, capable of communicating effectively with voters, when given a little time for a stump speech. He just never gained any traction in that primary, because Obama was a comet and Clinton...well, was a Clinton. This, of course, does not mean he would've been an effective President from 2008-2016, just that he was a better candidate than people gave him credit for. And this happens in crowded primaries all the time.
By even the latter half of his vice-presidency, it was very clear he had slowed down. I am not sure he could've ever gotten on a major ticket again in normal circumstances, but 2020 ended up being exactly the right environment for him, as Silver alludes to.
Biden never used the Bully Pulpit, and that is all Trump uses. Dems never use it, except for DEI and Trans issues, which are losing issues. And that's why Kamala lost to a thrice-married adulterer, convicted felon, and narcissistic sociopath.
+1
Evaluations of a Presidency in the long run often linger on a few bullet points of judgment, as many of us don't have the time to delve into 700-page examinations of all the crises and sucesses/failures one encounters in those 4-8 years.
My guess is Biden will be judged on the following 5 issues...and spoiler alert, none of them have anything to do with BBB and Chips. These will be so forgotten in 50 yrs that they won't even elicit footnotes.
I'll link 1 and 2 together, as while they're different, they're inextricably linked...
#1 and #2: Biden's late departure from the Race and his Inability to ensure Trump would not return. Historically, we will criticize #1 as a product of hubris on the part of Biden. I have the contrarian view that Biden's cognitive limitations obscured his own insight into his electoral vulnerability (think abt your elderly parent who insists that their driving is adequate) and put more blame here on his advisors who didn't twist his arm, but historians will likely highlight hubris. Secondly, the preeminent crisis of Biden's Presidency will be whether or not he wounded - or better, killed - Trumpism. This will be most naturally evaluated on whether or not his first 4 yrs concluded with Napoleon returning from Elba...sorry, Trump returning from Mar a Lago. Obviously, mission failed.
#3: Ukraine: Fair or not, in 50 yrs, we will look at Russia's eventual success in Ukraine (ie getting away with an upcoming deal that will be ridiculously favorable to Russia), as a black mark on Trump, but also one impugning Biden's inability to finish things off before 2025. While it may be ridiculous, I anticipiate there will be historical shaming of Biden for not doing enough in 2022-24 to equip Ukraine with the materiel might to force a Russian withdrawal prior to Trump's return.
#4: Inability to read the Tea leaves on the Economy: Harris's defeat will be pinned on a failure of Biden's admin to understand that most barometers of the economy they cited to tout their success (stock market, low unemployment), failed to illuminate that people simply worried too much about what fraction of their budget was going to rent and groceries. Historians will castigate Biden for telling the American people the economy was great when they were feeling constant budget constraint. This is reductionist, I know, but that's how it'll go.
#5: Afghanistan: This one is weird, as I feel it had no importance w/ respect to Trump's victory at all. I honestly suspect there are truly less than 10,000 Americans who voted for Trump, but would've voted for Harris had the conculsion to Afghanistan gone differently. Nevertheless, historians love when approval ratings tell a narrative. And Biden's resultant dip following the pull-out, and more importantly, his inability to ever tread water again, will be a long-cited inflection point in his Presidency, when the historians get invovled.
All good points... I will just add this thought: I honestly don't think ANY Dem president could have killed 'Trumpism'. Not ANYONE! Not in today's media climate. Example: my elderly father watches about an hour of Fox News per day. He voted for Trump but thinks he is a terrible person. And yet, what did he say when I brought up Liz Cheney? "I don't like her." He couldn't even explain why. He's been brainwashed by Fox News. The constant and growing flood of mis- and disinformation is keeping Trumpism alive.
I never liked Biden and I have actually met him too! How did the democrats get talked into believing that Biden was the only person out of all Americans over 35 to be able to beat Trump?
He has been too cautious and timid, too quiet about his accomplishments, and way too kind to the states that raged the most against him. He might have made good moves with Covid, and attempted to do something about climate change, but his position on Gaza was despicable.
As far as Trump goes, we really need to get him out of our heads. We have allowed him to take up far more of our attention that is healthy.
Republicans can do anything. The opposition to them cannot be merely human, it has to be infallible, perfect and omniscient. Their character has to be better than any saint of the Catholic Church ever aspired to, let alone happened to be. Until that happens, the opposition is going to devour itself, or execute circular firing squads or whatever.
This is a ridiculous standard to have, and highlights that the descent into idiocy is not entirely on one side.
Nice article, makes sense to me.
A great analysis piece that sums up his presidency very well, sad but true