Biden gets a solid “meh” on my rating scale. He’ll no doubt get lambasted for presuming to negotiate with Republicans on the budget deal, but if it goes through, my impression of him (for minimal grandstanding and political posturing) goes up a notch.
We’ve had much worse, and not too long ago.
While my understanding is that all of this is true (and if we do have a recession, it looks likely to be a shallow, short one), but consumer confidence is weak, and consumer spending is down. People react to news stories that make things sound dire (interest rates went up again, Google laid off a bunch of people, the housing bubble has burst, etc.), and that affects their mood, moreso than looking at those fundamentals – which, frankly, most people don’t look at, and/or don’t really understand.
Also, while, yes, inflation is a lot lower today than it was in the 80s, anyone under the age of 50 likely has little or no memory of what high inflation really was like – to them, the current inflation rates are unprecedented.
To be fair, you could be 14 years old and still think Biden is the 2nd worst President of your lifetime. It’s not great insult to Biden to rank him behind Obama, IMHO.
Biden has done more to sew hatred and division in this country than any president in U.S. history. Race relations and other forms of imagined prejudice have reached an all time high.
I’d rank LBJ very high, except for Vietnam. His domestic policies were transformative.
Holy Crap, I missed that. He seems like such a nice guy.
sewing division:
As busy as the POTUS must be, and still has time for needlework?
TIL race relations are a form of prejudice.
Drugs kill, dude.
Really, this is one of the most asinine statements I have ever read here.
PS - It’s “sow,” not “sew.”
I eagerly await your evidence of things Biden has done to sow hatred and division.
I think Biden is good at the mechanics(?- not sure what to call it) of the job. He’s old-school and works for consensus, he understands the role of President, he wheels and deals where he needs to, and acts like the leader of the free world when required.
I’m not 100% behind his policies- I disagree with several. But even disagreeing with him, I acknowledge that he’s good at the actual doing of the job itself. I think that Biden isn’t perfect- he could be more dynamic, less “Old Uncle Joe” , and do a better job of being the de-facto party head than he is.
I feel like he needs to shut up voices on his side that don’t further the party line- having multiple people saying multiple divergent things only makes the party look weak and confuses any voters who haven’t figured out how to vote yet (and they must be easily confused, or they’d have figured it out by now).
But for all that, he’s breathtakingly better than Trump, and is if nothing else, setting an example of how a politically divisive President can still govern effectively, even if his policies are controversial.
I think saying he’s a solid “B” President isn’t an insult; a B isn’t a bad grade after all. This isn’t grad school grading anyway- plenty of Presidents get ranked at C or worse.
Well, first off, he’s a president and a Democrat. You can’t have that.
Second, he sends aid to both blue and red states, rather than just red states, which is somehow divisive? Also, he honors the military rather than mocks them and, uh, that’s also divisive? He repaired our relationships with NATO and other allies, so if you hate NATO and our allies, that would definitely be divisive. He doesn’t refer to some countries as shithole countries – what if they really are shitholes? Isn’t that divisive somehow?
I don’t know, it was like a post from another timeline.
Especially since The Previous Guy blew the bottom out of the curve. Future historians are going to have to invent new letters to show just exactly how bad he was.
You and me both. Yeah, he’s pretty much in stealth mode a lot more than he should be, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t getting things done. He doesn’t speak well? Well, he has a speech impediment, so I don’t think beating up on him for that is appropriate. A simple search will reveal all that’s been accomplished, but that’s not what the oppo crowd does.
I continue to be impressed. I agree that Biden is doing quite well.
Do you mean the time Biden spent years accusing, with zero evidence, the first black President of lying about his place of birth?
Or the time Biden took deliberate action to separate (permanently!) migrant families, creating hundreds if not thousands of orphans who may never see their parents again, to deter future migrants?
Or the time he, without evidence, spread lies about the 2020 election results, continuing to this day to insist (again, with zero evidence) that the results were fraudulent?
Or was it something else Biden said or did? If so, what was it?
I feel like had Biden got the nomination in 2016 and been elected, he’d have been viewed as sort of a follow-on for Obama, but nothing special in his own right. Maybe not quite a caretaker president, but not too far off either.
I think you (and many others) are discounting the Inflation Reduction Act, which was really an environmental law (gift link):
That’s an op-ed from someone who worked on it, so it’s not doubt skewed, but it’s pretty well sourced. Paul Krugman is also singing its praises for helping to get green energy up the curve.
Maybe this goes to Biden not being a great communicator?
By the way, @HoneyBadgerDC, do you still feel this way?:
This sounds like a view of the presidency as inspirer and motivator-in-chief. IMO, it should be mostly about the decisions he’s made: for example, getting out of Afghanistan when it was increasingly clear we were accomplishing nothing and there was no hope of ever making long term change. That was a tough decision, and one that prior presidents hadn’t been willing to make, but he made it, and the situation since we left has just reinforced (IMO) how wise that was.
I have trouble thinking of any major decisions he’s made that have been wrong. Presumably his long years of experience has contributed to his wisdom in making big decisions. What decisions of his do you see as, say, worse than GWB’s decision to invade Iraq, which got thousands and thousands of Americans killed, wasted trillions of dollars, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and accomplished pretty much nothing positive for the US?