What, exactly, would that look like?
I was enthusiastic about voting for Biden. I’d probably vote for anyone running against Trump, but for the first time in a long time I was voting for someone, and not against someone.
Not like having a huge Biden tattoo across my back or anything, but having him as president felt like a huge leap back to normalcy. I preferred him over any of the other serious Democratic candidates. He wasn’t a compromise for me.
I think he has been fine. I’m happy with how things have been. My only dissatisfaction is that there doesn’t seem like a big push against the attempted insurrection. And while I appreciate his attempts to support voting rights legislation, it didn’t seem like a priority. I would have liked to see that just behind Covid recovery as a cornerstone of his presidency. Covid and voting rights are the biggest crises we’ve faced the last few years.
Same thing happened with Obama.
The Prez can do only so much by himself. And with a GOP determined to block EVERYfuckingTHING, it is hard to get things done.
Not to mention the Russian bots.
Were you around during 2017-2021?!?
Put forth initiatives. Use the bully pulpit. Be aggressive using executive orders. Republicans may block him at every turn. They’d oppose him if he declared water was wet. Make them go on record. Make them fight for it. Get out in the public and sell your policies (assuming he had any to sell).
Obama kept being a dupe for trying to meet republicans in the middle as they kept backpedaling. Biden has been doing the same.
Biden is all “Kumbaya” and McConnell is all “Go fuck yourself.”
I don’t know where you get this impression from. He is using the bully pulpit and he has been pushing for legislation that would get zero Republican votes.
What policies is he pushing the republicans hard on? Going all 12 rounds? Taking them to the mat?
I cannot think of a time I have seen him get tough on anything.
As you say, he’s going to get a “Go fuck yourself” from McConnell. The big bills he has pushed either passed with zero (or maybe two?) Republican senators or didn’t pass because he couldn’t get Manchin and Sinema on board.
He’s not all Kumaya with McConnell at all.
He is trying. And he has done better than maintaining the status quo, which to me at least implies that he’s no better than Trump. IMHO four years is more than enough to be the new status quo.
This piece in particular is something desperately needed. This seems to be one of the BIG issues young people have with Biden. Unless there is some deep secret the public doesn’t know, most of the visible reasons appear to be political cowardice. Why hasn’t Trump been indicted yet? We have five theories.
And it’s not just young people. Prosecuting criminals, no matter how rich or important they are, or how politically unpopular/inconvenient it is, is desperately needed to restore faith in our system. Trump made a joke of our laws & Constitution, and allowing him to get away with it, and so far, that’s exactly what Biden is doing, doesn’t motivate people to get out and vote Democrat.
For the record, Manchin has had his popularity go up by double digits over the last two years:
The likely reason for Biden going down with independents is that he has largely governed like a Democrat rather than like an independent.
If you get into power on the back of centrists, it’s no wonder that they’re going to stop liking you when you don’t deliver as a centrist.
Ballotopedia.org: “Joe Biden’t Executive Orders and Actions”
Republicans have no problem “going on record” to oppose legislation and initiatives that would benefit the general public, and given the actions of J__ M______ and K______ S_____ it would seem the people he needs to fight the most are at least ostensibly within his own party. ‘Fighting’ with Republicans just to be seen fighting with them is the kind of pointless, unproductive oppositional defiance that had the GOP literally accomplish nothing for the first two years of the previous administration.
Obama put all of his political capital into getting the Affordable Care Act—which was literally the least worst health care access legislation he could get through Congress—and then watching every single other thing he did, including perennial promises to close down the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center and his nomination of Merrick Garland, be held up in committee and never even come to a vote. Obama was, of course, infamous (in the eyes and mouths of Fox Newsheads, certainly) and heavily criticized for relying on executive orders, most famously Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, even though executive policy on immigration enforcement is entirely within the purview of the President and Congress has famously refused to address immigration reform (actually a fault of both parties) for decades.
It isn’t exactly clear what you expect Biden to do but you seem to be looking for vitriolic public battles in which Biden calls out Republicans with insults, threats, and intimidation. Setting aside that this would accomplish exactly nothing and feed directly into the Fox and OANN characterization of Biden as some kind of hyperprogressive liberal devil-man, it is also an expectation that is not at all how Biden has ever presented himself and not what most people who voted for him actually want, nor would it be productive in terms of recruiting potential voters who are already alienated by the nastiness of modern political discourse.
The fundamental problem isn’t with Biden (or any other president), who actually has very limited powers to make substantive change without legislative support, but with the voting public of whom many are entirely comfortable with electing anti-democratic demagogues espousing bigotry and transparently dog-whistling to racists and white nationalists even if they claim to not support these movements themselves. There is a larger issue with both parties in having abandoned the needs of the general public in pursuit of corporate benefactors and a system of campaign finance and conduct with perverse incentives to ignore long term problems in favor of acquiring enough of a ‘war chest’ to have a chance of winning the next election. There are a very few principled politicians who manage to ride the line between getting enough support to be electable and still do their elected duty to represent their constituents instead of corporate interests but that is a tenuous position to be in when campaigns keep getting more expensive and one side in particular has been cultivating a propaganda system that is finely tuned to punch peoples’ emotional hot buttons on meaningless ‘culture war’ issues.
This is not to say that the Biden Administration has been ideal or had a perfect record of making the right decision at every turn but the idea that Biden is just treading water to maintain the status quo really isn’t correct even if you are looking at effects and certainly not in initiatives. If you think the situation is bad now, wait another eight months when the GOP will almost certainly control one house of Congress and likely both, and it will be total legislative constipation along with a continuous stream of lawsuits to prevent any kind of executive action from being put into effect. No amount of cursing or name-calling will prevent that.
Stranger
Metaphors don’t answer the question. If the following is what you’re suggesting, then I agree with Stranger.
Anything legislative needs Manchin & Sinema. The actual legislation being blocked by them has been reasonably progressive. But what can Biden do about them? He’s stuck. I think he’s done a reasonably good job under the circumstances.
Biden’s popularity is sagging because he’s a symbol in people’s minds of the current state of America - very slowly coming back from coronavirus, and a shaky economy with a lot of reason to fear. It doesn’t actually matter what he does, at least in the short-term.
The time when these legislative failures will come back to hurt the dems is in likely future elections (beyond 2024) when they can’t run on existing programs that are popular. Democrats creating or expanding social programs usually isn’t immediately popular, but if they wind up being effective they become popular later esp. in the face of threats of a retraction from the GOP.
I think purely looking at executive actions there’s a lot I disagree with him on, but I don’t think any of those contributed significantly to his popularity.
I agree, except that Manchin and Sinema deserve no more blame than any two random Republicans. Since when is party loyalty a virtue?
Biden has done an excellent job on Ukraine. His state department even deserves some of the credit for the winding down of the biggest war in Africa (Tigray).
Biden is stuck with a party identified with unpopular woke policies. He can say many times that most cops are good and that he wants to fund the police, but people who are scared of rising crime are still going to think the GOP is stronger on fighting crime.
As for race conscious policies, they are unpopular with most voters, including me. With Biden? I don’t know. But if he made clear he believes in race-neutrality, while I would like it, people who prioritize that issue more than I do probably wouldn’t believe him.
You can’t be serious. I don’t wish to derail this thread, so I’ll just say, maintaining the status quo (or actually returning to normalcy) is 1000x better than his predecessor.
That seems to be a grammar error on my part. What I was trying to say is that at the time of Biden’s election, Trumpism was the status quo. It’s clear that Biden is doing a lot better than Trump, and thus doing better than the status quo.
My implied criticism wasn’t of Biden, but of those people who voted for Biden but aren’t going to vote in the midterms, for having a short memory and believing that Biden represents the status quo even though he’s actually doing a lot better.
Thanks for clarifying. I agree.
I think Biden’s doing very well. But, honestly being “not Trump” was enough for me then, and enough for now. He’s much more than that, so I’m happy.
I agree. Which is why I don’t understand the people for who that isn’t enough, and are planning to sit out the midterms because of that.
…it would include not things like “fund the police” a central part of your platform, along with adding 32 billion dollars worth of new funding to “fight crime” over the next decade.