I’ve heard that some are not impressed with Kamala Harris’s job thus far, but Biden?
Firstly, I think that’s a bit of a misleading way to put it. For example, the Vice President is a member of the National Security Council and is present at all security briefings, and this has been the case since about WWII. I guess a president could override that norm, it’s not the case that a president has to explicitly decide to grant it.
Secondly, this is a bit of a tangent. My point is simply that before I would consider Biden blameless in the strategic failures during Obama’s term (yes, those failings are dwarfed by the mistakes of the administration that went there in the first place) I want to know what his role was. Perhaps every day he told Obama that they were supporting the wrong people and needed to do more to fight corruption and cronyism. That would be great. We don’t know that that’s what happened yet.
Lots of people have made that argument, how many people have cited that the constitution says the VP’s job is just to step in as president if the incumbent dies? What point do you suppose they were trying to make?
No. I’ve been absolutely consistent on this: I would consider Biden to be blameless if he had no part in the strategic failures. *If* they did disagree on the actual handling of the occupation, then that’s another thing Biden has done well. I’m not the one assuming anything here.
Yes, I agree with the OP: I am badly disappointed that President Biden has still not put him in jail.
But when President Biden, or better still, the AG of the USA does put him in jail I am confident that he will not pardon him. So justice delayed brings a longer anticipation.
I always find that amusing. VP’s don’t have much of a job and that includes Biden when he was VP. There job is to sit in on meetings and advise, be a public administration cheerleader and overall goodwill ambassador and cast a vote in the Senate if necessary. They’re the political equivalent of a Walmart greeter that just happens to be next in line to succeed the CEO.
Harris has been as boring as any of them. Which is what her job calls for.
More visible in the media age? Sure. Have more internal influence? Only if granted.
I’m amused by the disconnect. Half the nutballs think Harris isn’t doing much at her job while the other half think she’s calling all the shots behind the scenes and Biden is just a senile figurehead. Make up what passes for your minds, will you?
Again “granted” is misleading since in most cases it’s whether the president chooses to override existing norms.
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Let’s go back to basics because I think some people are getting hung up on this tangent.
Imagine there is a job called “Presidential Buddy”. This job is not even mentioned in the Constitution, therefore the Buddy has zero Constitutional powers.
However, for the better part of a century, this job has involved attending all security briefings, being the closest person to the president and advising the president.
Finally, let’s imagine the president has an amazing term; every decision has very high public approval and he always seems incredibly well informed.
Question: Does the president’s success reflect well on the Buddy?
I would say “yes”. We have no idea yet what the actual advice he/she gave was, perhaps all their advice was awful but was all correctly ignored by the president. But initially, at face value, it seems more likely that they gave good advice. It’s not a matter of claiming that the Buddy has power over the president.
Now substitute Vice President for Buddy, and 8 years of strategic failures in Afghanistan for the golden presidential term.
But remember: I overall really appreciate Biden and think he’s doing a great job. I think Obama did too. But I’m not afraid to criticize if some things weren’t ideal.
I think it’s a pretty straightforward way to put it. Misleading would be to imply that the VP has any actual powers that are not explicitly granted by the president.
Yes, the president would have to explicitly grant it. There is nowhere in the description of the office of VP that automatically puts him on the NSC. It’s a formality, and pretty much every president has done so, but there is some slip of paper that has to be signed by the president in order for that to happen.
He would have had no role, really. He had not authority over the military.
What if it was just every other day, or once a week?
And I’m not at all sure that the primary reason for doing that is to get the VP’s advice. The VP is supposed to be ready to take over for the President at any moment – that actually is his job – and keeping him up to speed on security briefings and discussions about it is important in order to accomplish that.
Being able to give advice at the meetings may well be desired and useful, but it’s a side effect.
IIRC, Roosevelt didn’t loop Truman in on anything, although he must have known he was dying - so when FDR died, Harry had to do a lot of catch up fast (including the atom bomb - although that was such a high-level secret Truman might not have gotten info anyway).
Not only have I not implied such a thing, I have explicitly said, several times, that the VP has no authority over anything.
Yes, I know he has no authority. This does not automatically make him blameless. I’ve given an argument for why I hold this opinion, and I gave an analogy to further explain my position in my previous post. Are you going to engage with the actual arguments or just keep strawmanning my position?
Him. Her. Them. The VP. We were talking about Biden, yes; but in that post I was talking about VP’s in general. The back of one’s head is full of assumptions even when one thinks they’re long gone –
There is, however, the statutory description of the NSC that explicitly puts the VP on it, and as red-letter U.S. law (National Security Act of 1947, as amended) cannot be simply overridden at the President’s whim.
Which is not to say that the Veep gets a voice on the council; I’d guess that the reason Congress put her on it was to ensure the ability to step into the Presidential seat at a moment’s notice, not having been kept in the dark about important national security information.
ETA: that is to say, what thorny_locust already said.
Let’s suppose, hypothetically, that Biden and Obama were on total opposite ends of the spectrum regarding Afghanistan during Biden’s VP years.
Even if they disagree on the strategy, wouldn’t it benefit the administration and the constituency if the White House put forth a united front in public? Biden may have very well been disagreeing rather stridently on Obama’s approach. But if Biden only objects when they’re alone, and supports the plan (or at least doesn’t openly criticize it when around cameras and reporters), then I think that adds a nuance to our discussion.
It’s like when parents have to crack the whip (metaphorically speaking) on disciplining a child; they may disagree behind closed doors, but have each other’s back in order to avoid confusion or undermining the situation.
If he has no authority, and disagreed in private, then I don’t understand your criticism. The buck stopped with Obama. Short of publicly breaking with the president, what could he have done differently?
If he disagreed in private.
The people who are saying Biden’s blameless on the strategic failures are the ones asserting something about those private conversations. I am simply saying that whether he’s blameless would depend on those conversations.
Right now, we know that he disagreed with the US being there at all. Good.
But in terms of the details of the occupation, I don’t think we know yet, but it doesn’t look good that he was a close advisor to the president for 8 years and Obama made some errors in terms of this campaign – not the worst errors by a long shot, but still.
So is it too much to ask that you state something clearly? Really, what the fuck are you talking about?
I don’t know how I could possibly be more clear than my previous post. Do you have any response, other than unnecessary rudeness?
I have to guess it’s along the lines of:
We can’t actually know the details of Biden’s conversations with Obama about the occupation, but mistakes were made, and Biden was there, so therefore we should be open about blaming Biden for the whole mess.
Unnecessary?? I wasted probably 1-1/2 to 2 minutes reading, and rereading a paragraph that you wrote that didn’t say anything. Seriously, if I was tasked with writing an entire paragraph that didn’t really say anything, that would be difficult. Kudos?
What were those errors, and what difference would it have made if they had not been made?