In the thread on the State of the Union address thread we had the following posts
Now I like Biden alright but I don’t see that he has been more effective than Obama. His main accomplishment is the Infrastructure Bill, followed perhaps by his support for Ukraine. I think these fall short of some of Obama’s accomplishments, in particular the ACA, but also the Iran deal, and DACA.
Still I would be very interested as to why others feel differently.
What metric is used for this determination? Going by number of agenda items is different than value of agenda items.
I’d recommend reading pretty much anything Heather Cox Richardson has written in the last two years, to get a sense of what Biden has actually accomplished, despite the general lack of acknowledgement of those achievements in the popular culture.
In short, he really has done quite a lot. Saying he’s one of the most successful Presidents, particularly in just two years, isn’t an exaggeration.
Obama got a few big-ticket items passed, but Biden has just machined-gunned out a lot of lesser, but still important, things.
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Is the OP comparing Obama’s accomplishments in eight years to two years of Biden’s?
How can that possibly work?
Ukraine support is something almost any President would have done–and gotten a lot of bipartisan support for.
Much of the positive feelings about Biden are simply because he followed the worst President in U.S. history–Trump.
Those were VP Biden successes almost as much as Obama’s.
I tend to agree with this, and add that Biden had the really tough job of still having to clean up after the mess Trump created (who seemed to place time bombs such as Afghanistan, who knows how many we are not told about) to help wreck the next president, and basically divide the GOP into 2 separate parties MAGA/Non MAGA.
Obama took what worked OK and made it work better. Biden took what was shit on, shut down, plundered, and land mined and made it livable and functioning again. So much different and very hard to compare.
Pretty funny, because Obama followed arguably the worst president in history up to that point, too.
As to the OP, I would say that Biden was better about using his short time with a friendly congress than Obama was. Obama spent a ton of political capital on the ACA (which is a good thing, of course), where Biden seems to have done a lot more smaller things, and the infrastructure bill.
Obama broke the White House color barrier, which was arguably the greatest Civil Rights accomplishment possible in the United States, and he broke it in style. For eight years he was an intelligent, articulate, decent, and caring human being who was a credit to the Office of the Presidency. I don’t think anyone could be more successful than that.
On the other hand, the Republicans did everything they could to make sure he was as ineffective as they could possibly make him. Instead of making an effort to work with him for the sake of the nation, they were busy trying to impeach him for wearing a gray suit to an Easter church service with his family. I credit any lack of political success to that shameful dynamic.
I would say Biden has been more successful so far, but mainly because of a general awakening within the Democratic party, and implosion within the GOP, not necessarily BIden’s own traits.
There is an understanding that the MAGA party can’t really be reasoned with. It took Obama a while to get this, but with Biden beginning his presidency with events like Jan 6th, it was very obvious from day 1.
Now, I still think that Dems try too hard to appease the Republicans. But at least we’re starting down the road of calling out the BS, and working past the GOP to get shit done.
I also want to say, I’m not knocking Brandon; he works hard, and he played a sweet game in his STFU SOTU. I very much like him as a person. But I still hope he doesn’t run for a second term. I want someone quicker on the draw and more aggressive.
Each Democratic president has faced increasingly uncooperative opposition from the Republicans. Bill Clinton had Newt Gingrich, father of the “what if we didn’t” philosophy as well as Rush Limbaugh and Hate Radio. Obama had the Tea Party, FOX “News”, and the rise of social media conspiracy theories. Biden had to survive an insurrection to even get in the White House plus complete insanity from the MAGA House members. That any of these guys got anything at all is remarkable.
In my opinion Obama did more than Clinton and Biden did more than Obama. Obama got the ACA passed which was a big fucking deal, but that was it. Biden got the infrastructure deal passed and has appointed a good many federal judges. He transitioned the US out of covid and strengthened NATO after his predecessor mismanaged the former and tried to destroy the latter. Had Biden lost the election, Ukraine would have fallen due to lack of American support and the Baltics may have fallen as well.
Thanks everyonhe for participating in this thread. I should make clear that I didn’t have a particular agenda when I made the thread. The motivation was that I saw two distinct posters make the same assertion that I found surprising and I wanted to know more about their reasoning behind it without highjacking the original thread. So I’m leaving the definition of success open.
She has made an awful lot of posts, are there any particular examples you want to highlight?
Yes, I think Obama was the first Democratic president run headlong into the full force of the party over country Republican agenda. He still thought that both parties wanted what was best for the country but just had different ideas of what that was. It took him a while to realize that, no, their goal was to damage the US as much as possible with the hope that he would take the blame. Biden had the advantage of knowing what he was getting into from the start.
This is a good one, that highlights Biden’s governance vs. Republican talking points:
I wonder if the members of the Nobel peace prize selection committee are kicking themselves for blowing their wad 12 years too early.
I think that this is strongly related my previous point above. Obama wasted a lot of time because he hadn’t realized that the rules of the game had changed, and that no ammount of negotiation would get any nominee approved. So he only had a short window between the time they killed the judical filibuster and Republicans took over the Senate.
This is a good point about NATO, that not only got the US to give Ukraine aid but also had the NATO countries unite on the issue, although its not clear how to divide the credit for that among the NATO members Still it happened on his watch.
Also in his court was the relatively successful midterms which were much better than Obama’s “Shellacking”, although I think the backlash against Dobbs helped a great deal.
I disagree with the several posters who claimed that 1/6 taught Biden that he couldn’t deal with the Republicans. His public remarks over his first two years don’t show that. He kept emphasizing bipartisanship to the point where Dems in Congress were frustrated, if not furious, that he wasn’t pushing harder.
Of course, he had majorities in both houses so he could afford not publicly pushing back on people whose voted didn’t count. But he dealt weakly with those who did: Manshin and Sinema got away with far too much and nearly derailed the achievements we’re talking about.
That’s why his SofU speech this week got such roars. He treated the Reps as deadly enemies by playing them as fools, a political jiu-jitsu that upended them in real time. The only bipartisanship in this era is by making it impossible to oppose a plan and dragging the opposition kicking and screaming to your goal. Let’s see if Biden can clean up the debt ceiling in the same way. That’s when we’ll begin to see if Biden is working the Presidency in a way Obama never could.
Note that this leverage disappears the day he says he’s not running in 2024. Not one word he utters matters after that. Dems will have nothing to bargain with at any time or use as a club. Biden knows that down to his toes. I’m betting that that one single fact determines his decision more than anything other than a major health attack.
Biden has been an excellent president so far. It’s almost as if age can come with the benefits of experience and wisdom.
I’m a bit surprised that nobody so far seems to have taken the position, which I would somewhat tentatively subscribe to, that the Biden presidency essentially is the third term, so to speak, of the Obama presidency.
AFAICT, Biden as Prez is following a lot of the same strategies for a cohesive and effective administration that he previously helped shape as Veep. Of course there are major differences, but it sure seems to me that there are a lot of fundamental similarities.
Good god - for whatever reason that never really occurred to me before. Let’s hope whatever happens in the next couple of elections that we break that cycle!
There’s a difference between remarks and reality.
This is not to suggest that Biden has been duplicitous, merely that he is aware of Jan 6th and the prosperous hunter Biden attacks that the last prez even sold the country out for.
He talks of bipartisanship as an ideal, as an option on the table if republicans were ever to wake from their fever dream. But, in the meantime, he sees how he can get things done despite them.
And I think the speech was completely consistent with his actions over these two years.
The clip of him pwning the MAGAs has got a lot of play on TV, but far more of the speech was about bipartisanship, even crediting the republicans with helping pass some of his key legislation that in fact received zero republican votes.
The point is: the olive branch is still there. But we’re not going to wait for you to reach for it.