What has the Biden administration done that's so awful?

Politics & Elections
1

Trying to get factual (or at least rational opinion-based) answers here. It’s difficult to sift through the venom and desperate gamesmanship (from both sides) to get an issue-related discussion. I have read many articles talking about how badly the Biden administration is doing. (Here’s one example from an interview Chris Christie gave to Hugh Hewitt. “And my biggest concern about all this is while Joe Biden and his administration is doing things to this country that may be undoable…” (link).

What things are they doing? Does it just boil down to spending and taxes? Judge appointments?

Again, please try to stick to a factual discussion. Thanks!

2

Well one thing it appears Trump has left a time bomb with the Afghanistan pull out: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/afghanistan-airport-explosion-happened-under-biden-traces-back-trump-ncna1277755

I would not be surprised if Trump didn’t leave more, actually I would be if he did not.

3

isn’t a lot of it just partisanship? people of the presidents party will give 80-90% support while people of opposing parties will give 10-20% support and those are largely independent of actual policy.

having said that there are a few issues.

criticism from the left:

he isn’t doing a good job of maintaining unity in the senate. maybe not his fault, but Sinema and Manchin run the show and he’s not getting big legislation passed. Biden and Schumer come across as not having party discipline.

he probably got authorization to cancel student loans, but hid the memo instead

the AG that Biden appointed feels like he’s dragging his feet when it comes to defending democracy from fascism and white supremacists.

he is dragging his feet on replacing some trump appointees like dejoy

general criticisms:

inflation is an issue

supply chain issues

the Afghanistan pullout was not done well

covid is still a big issue (although I don’t know what Biden can do about it)

4

I think that the problem you are having is that if you sift through the venom and desperate gamesmanship there is literally nothing left.

There are a number of things that have not gone particularly well for Biden. Examples include: messy Afghan withdrawl, high inflation, continuing and recently spiking pandemic, shortages of various products, increased Russian aggression, failure to pass key agenda items.

As a partisan Democrat it is not clear to me how much control Biden had over these things. Overall I haven’t seen any shining examples of greatness nor any giant blunders. But since he’s president he automatically gets blamed when things go bad, and his opponents will reflexively hyperbolize every possible misstep. Christy’s statement clearly falls in that area.

If pushed Christy would probably point to such things as massive government spending, authoritarian vaccine mandates, partisan witch hunt investigations of the insurrection etc. But it all boils down to venom and gamesmanship.

5

IMHO it’s not what he’s done. The things he and his administration have done are good things. It’s the things he hasn’t done that are problems. In particular, the investigation and prosecution of the 1/6/2021 insurrection is a big problem. Biden and Merrick Garland seem to be ignoring the matter when it comes to Trump and his top level cronies and their role in the insurrection. Instead they’ve left the matter to a House with a tenuous Democratic majority.

This is the only one on your list that I have particular problems with, as I noted above. But it’s a huge one. Treating this like just one more problem among a list of many problems (the ones you mention such as inflation, COVID-19, student loan debt, the Afghanistan pullout, etc.) is a HUGE mistake. This is the critical issue of our time, and leaving it to the House to investigate, with the likely deadline of the mid-term elections limiting the potential of that investigation, is a huge mistake. I honestly don’t know why we haven’t heard from Biden and Garland on the matter. If the shoe were on the other foot, I can guarantee that Trump and a Republican AG like Bill Barr wouldn’t be sitting on the sidelines while some House committee conducts a slow and likely ultimately ineffectual investigation.

6

How much can someone except any administration to do in just over one year? There are some good factual answers in the posts so far, but other than maybe the insurrection issue I can’t see how they can be held to blame for them. From my perspective, setting the White House back to a semblance of normalcy had to be a major focus of the first year, unfortunately.

Thanks for the answers. I don’t feel like I’ve missed any big smoking guns after all.

7

This. 100% this.
Prosecute them and move on. It’s the only way that democracy will be saved.

8

Lemme fix that for you: Prosecute them successfully and move on.

It’s unclear if any prosecution will be successful at convicting these guys, Trump Hisself in particular. First, it’s difficult to prove the necessary intent, and second, it will be a crapshoot to get a jury free of any die-hard Trump partisans.

If Trump ends up in court (civil or criminal, but especially criminal) and wins his case(s), it will simply be Trump skating as he always has.

9

Don’t forget that although Trump helped get vaccines developed (even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then), there was absolutely no infrastructure or plan for distributing it. So the Biden administration had to scramble to get it to people. which led to delays, and a need to prioritize it for the most vulnerable until they could get enough to the states. Here is an early article talking about the problem getting the vaccine to folks:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/health/covid-19-vaccine-demand-outpacing-supply/index.html

Data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows there’s still a gap in the number of Covid-19 vaccines that have been distributed to states and the number of shots that have gone into arms, but as states’ vaccine campaigns have picked up the pace, states complain the federal government is not sending vaccines fast enough.

Note that this wasn’t on Biden. The article was written the day before he was inaugurated. That’s a mess he had to clean up ASAP.

10

Biden is a Democrat.

That’s all. That is the only explanation needed. There is no further analysis needed.

It’s just that simple. It does not matter what he does or does not do. For Republicans and especially Trumpers, if Biden found a cure for cancer, they’d bitch about all the doctors he put out of work.

11

Biden is falling into the usual centrist trap: He’s liberal enough to piss off conservatives but not liberal enough to please liberals.

For instance, he still refuses to enact forgiveness of student debt, and he hasn’t really done anything particularly liberal. While his being a D alone is enough to piss off the Rs.

Presidents need to learn to cater to their own party alone and stop caring about the other side - whether D or R.

12

Exactly so.

It’s pretty tribal. Democrats are generally satisfied that Biden is within the normal range of Presidential ineptitude, unlike his predecessor, who plumbed new depths there.

Republicans are getting stirred-up about any number of issues as fed to them by the GOP propaganda arm - just google ‘fox news biden’ then click on video and you will see the stuff they are saying…

  • Biden weakness on foreign policy (Ukraine)
  • Biden hurting the gun industry
  • Biden and his son, Hunter Biden (for some reason)
  • Biden is weak on the border issues and has an ‘open borders’ policy welcoming illegals
  • Biden’s pandemic mandates taking away freedom
  • Biden hates cops
  • Biden is old and frail and senile
    Etc, etc, etc…

If all you are hearing all day long is this mindless rabble, you are going to be walking around thinking Biden is doing an awful job.

13

The one thing I’ve heard which I have to admit might hold a little water is the notion that Biden’s appointing a black woman candidate to replace Justice Breyer, for the primary reason that she’s a woman and black, not because she’s the best candidate for the job.

Not that a black woman can’t be a SCOTUS justice, but might there possibly be a better qualified jurist of some other minority? Like say… a hispanic man, or a gay white woman, or an immigrant, or something like that? It does seem somewhat… limiting and strongly virtue-signaling to decide ahead of time that you’re going to appoint a black woman, and then see who’s available.

14

He hasn’t done anything really awful. I’d like him to be much more active in championing election reform and cannabis re-scheduling, among other issues, but most of what needs to be done needs to be done legislatively and Republicans and conservative Democrats are a problem there.

He’s a centrist and I’m a progressive so there will always be disappointment. But that’s not “awful.”

15

Yeah- no. It would have to pass Congress.

Yes. But we did not expect greatness. Just a return to sanity. Which Joe has done well.

Yeah, I know. Many Democrats would love nothing better than to see Garland hand down some indictments for trump and co. But this is something Biden is doing right. Indictments don’t mean shit. You need convictions, and those would be nearly impossible to get- remember- trump still has some 30%+ of the electorate in his pocket- any federal jury will have a couple of them on it, so no conviction. But then, when the GOP gets the Oval office, they will retaliate. We we get a sitrep like in the end of Republican Rome, when a politician has to stay in office of face charges from the opposition.

Yep.

16

Generally agree with the above. While outcomes on key measures haven’t been fabulous, at least I wake up without wondering what weird shit has just emanated from the White House or from a Presidential Twitter feed.

Worth noting that Biden’s first-year job approval ratings in the polls, while averaging lower than most other recent Presidents, are virtually the same as Bill Clinton’s and about ten points higher than those of Trump.

17

As others have pointed out, blaming the President for the pandemic, supply chain issues, or whatever all else isn’t reasonable. There’s only so much control that the person has.

I don’t blame him for the Afghanistan pullout. To be sure, it was a mess. But, based on the timing and the situation on the ground, it was effectively Trump’s chosen military commanders, the plan developed under the Trump administration, and manned with the number of people chosen by Trump. I’m reasonably willing to believe Biden that the only options were to press the “Go” button on what Trump had set up or perform a surge, get a bunch of people killed, and waste a lot more money just for the sake of being able to pull out in a more orderly way. I don’t fault him for going the first route.

But, all the people who arranged the messy pullout under Trump are all still employed. So I do fault Biden for that. Even if he was forced to take the hit, he could have still used it as an indicator of the competence of the crew he inherited and done what was necessary.

During the negotiations for the Infrastructure package, Biden went in to meet with the progressives in the House, to try and convince them to stop holding the thing hostage. My takeaway from the reports of the discussion is that they argued that they were just trying to get him everything he’d ever wanted, he got all warm and fuzzy towards them, and walked out having not really made any argument at all. And, as a consequence, we had several more weeks or months of thrashing that was all pointless because Manchin had already marked his line in the sand and there was no ambiguity on that. As a guy who’d been in the Senate for several decades, Biden almost certainly knew that the progressives were just a bunch of googly-eyed yahoos who were going to get played by Pelosi and that Manchin was going to get everything he wants, plus cake, but he was too enthralled by their passion to break the hard news to them.

With the latest issue between Ukraine and Russia, he’s been trying to negotiate with Russia all while Russia is maintaining that they’re not going to do anything. And to the extent that Russia may want to do something, it’s a crime that they’ve explicitly agreed not to commit as a part of joining the UN. It’s like offering the Joker free money if he’ll just stop staring at all the kids in the skating rink. At best, he’s going to go on a tour, staring at groups of kids, one after the other, to milk you for all you’re worth. And that’s the best case.

Biden has done some smart things. He negotiated the minimum corporate tax rate for the planet, he’s tackling corruption as an antecedent to political instability, he threw court packing into a pit to be ignored, etc.

On average, he’s doing pretty good. But he is a bit too nice for the job and if something horrible does happen under his watch (i.e., where it’s fair to blame him for it), that niceness is liable to be the cause.

18

Highlighting the problems Biden has with being President, I’d bet good money that, if we were able to get any serious anti-Biden posters to honestly answer this question with detailed objections, they’d point to this minimum tax as one of the “awful” things he’s done that will “ruin America”.

19

That concerned me a little too. As long as he picks someone who is well-qualified, I’m okay. You can’t say every pick for the Court is the best possible candidate; I doubt that’s ever true. There’s always some consideration beyond their suitability for the bench; what are their political beliefs, what controversies have they been involved in, etc.

If he puts forth someone terrible, that’s not only showing that he’s virtue-signaling, but it’s also a sign that he thinks no Black woman is better. It would probably be seen as an insult and backfire.

I won’t worry until we see who gets picked. And he can always push back against criticism by saying that the best candidates he had in mind were Black women, and it’s hard to prove otherwise.

20

He has done nothing awful. But there are some things I would rather he had done differently.

  • Like Obama, he thought that Republicans would work with him. He should have known better and came off looking like he took a spoon to a gunfight.
  • Although DJT negotiated the surrender of Afghanistan with the Taliban, the military should have planned for the contingency that the Afghan army would give up without a fight. Evacuations should have happened before the troops left.
  • Build Back Better should have taken a back seat to voting rights. It should have been job one. As it was, precious time was wasted on Manchin and Sinema, neither of which had any intention of cooperating.
  • He should have hired an AG who was much more interested in prosecuting the criminals in the previous administration.