Why is Biden being held to a much higher standard than Trump was?

Politics & Elections
61

What are you saying is “progressive” stuff? The infrastructure bill? The COVID mandate? The social safety net bill?

How could any set of bills be more mainstream Democratic than these? Do you think that Joe Manchin represents the majority of Democratics or is any kind of a centrist? Have Sanders or AOC gotten any of their major plans into bill form?

I don’t understand your argument. The progressives have gotten nothing, Biden is not pushing hard on anything that he had not emphasized while running, and I have not heard of any proposals from the “center” that are being ignored.

62

Then maybe they need to reframe the debate, because otherwise reputable news sources are painting his actions thus far as “left” or “far left”, whether or not they are mainstream Democrat or not. Maybe Progressive wasn’t the right word, because they seem pissed at him too, for daring to negotiate with Republicans on the infrastructure bill.

I guess where I’m going is that I think it’s a mistake for the two parties to pull farther from the center; the majority of people DO reside there, believe it or not. It’s too late for the Republicans, but not for the Democrats. And entertaining nonsense like UBI does nothing but hurt their case in the center, as do sweeping safety net bills and getting that level of pushback from within their own party for the infrastructure bill.

63

Herein lies the problem; Biden, despite his tendency to stutter and pause in speech, just hasn’t said enough stupid shit to be newsworthy and has consistently refused to tweet out in stream-of-consciousness mode at 3 am while excreting last night’s double Big Mac and fries, and so they media has to stretch to find problems. Fortunately, Biden came to the rescue by “bungling” the Afghanistan withdrawal (never mind that this was per an agreement made by the previous administration which finally followed through on promises made by the administration before that to get out of Afghanistan, and of course that the entire mess was created by the grinning fool running the administration before that who created the entire mess in the first place) and now the media has something solid to pin on him beyond wearing ‘dad jeans’ and not playing an appropriately executive amount of golf.

I am really enjoying how progressives feel like Biden isn’t doing enough for them while conservatives accuse him of literally being a fascist, and everybody else is gnashing teeth about how he isn’t servicing ‘the middle’ sufficiently, all while dealing with crises caused by indecision and lack of foresight by the previous three (or, if you really count them up, six) previous administrations as well as a large segment of the public who literally won’t raise a finger to protect themselves from the pandemic that has been ravaging the world for the past year and a half out of some combination of spite and proto-Idiocracy. If Biden were Stretch Armstrong he still wouldn’t be flexible enough to do the right thing by the media.

Hopefully his true offenses will get recognized someday, maybe like this:

Stranger

64

I wish it were otherwise, but I think while Biden is trying to get things done (like infrastructure), it will require negotiating and compromising with everyone. The problem is, people on one side of the table treat compromise like some sort of sin. Their interpretation of compromise is that the Democrats make all the compromises, and the Republicans get to have everything their way. Otherwise, no deal.

One group wants to get stuff done, the other ONLY wants to block what the first group wants to do, no matter if it is good for everyone. This is not how effective governing works, but I suppose that is part of the GOP playbook - they are out to prove how ineffective government can be. How do you negotiate with that? How do you get anything done while you are in charge?

65

We’re not living in ‘normal’ times and probably won’t see them again for a while, if ever. We’re living in a state of emergency, and we need presidential action that is commensurate with the situation. If Biden is looking to just keep a fragile coalition of progressives and centrist voters together, it probably won’t happen. Not now.

66

The media is wildly biased in favor of Republicans. It’s not just Trump, it’s any sort of democrat vs republican divide. They’re always trying to make excuses or soften what republicans do or make it seem normal, and on the flip side, over-state or make a bigger deal out of smaller democratic failures. I think at least part of this is motivated by the wrong idea of what it means to appear fear and balanced.

Republicans have been “working the refs” by screaming about the liberal media and anti-conservative bias for decades. And it’s working.

The media releases a neutral, factual report that makes conservatives look bad because they were doing something bad. They scream “biased! liberal media!” everywhere they can, amplified by millions of voices.

The media is taken aback by this response, and starts softballing conservative stupidity a little bit, or biasing the story in their favor, lest they risk losing their credibility in the minds of the masses by all this conservative shrieking about bias. So now they make stories that are actually pro-conservative, more than a balanced story would be.

The conservatives still scream. Media goes out of their way to bias their news even further. Try to find some minor issue on the liberal side and pretend it’s as big an issue as the issue on the conservative side in the name of balance. Compare and contrast mainstream conservative views with fringe kooky leftist views just to make it seem fair. They bend over backwards for decades to softball conservatives and make them look good, and yet conservatives still scream “liberal media!!!”

It’s a tactic. Not only are they changing the media to be pro-conservative, but whatever the media says that they don’t like can be dismissed as “liberal media” anyway.

And it’s working. Media organizations have to stop pandering to conservatives, and to stop trying to appear to be “fair” by stacking the deck so that they can say everyone is just as bad as everyone else.

Bringing it back to the sports analogy - imagine that the refs in a game called 10 penalties on both teams. Fair reffing, right? Well, what if one team only really committed one or two penalties, and the other team has committed 40 or 50 blatant penalties? Is calling 10 penalties on both sides still “fair”? Because that how the media stacks their reporting in favor of conservatives to make it “balanced”

There are other factors, too, like how liberals tend to actually care that the people they give power to actually do the right thing and do a good job of it, and republicans are purely tribal and will support their own no matter what, but the one I mentioned is a big explanation as to why the media is extremely motivated to do PR work for the republicans by making everything bad they do seem less bad, and everything bad democrats do as worse.

67

Best typo of the month.

Or worst.

68

Not to mention that much of the corporate media fears losing to Fox News. Jake Tapper tries to be a centrist who isn’t afraid to criticize ‘both sides’ and calls out Biden for ‘scolding’ unvaccinated Americans.

Hey Jake, maybe he wouldn’t have to scold unvaccinated Americans if people like you would do your fucking jobs and scold them yourself.

69

“Fox News: Fear and Backbiting”

It’s not just Tapper; all of CNN (and the “mainstream media” in general) is so fearful of being portrayed as “unbalanced” for expressing an opinion over what news reporting is actually factual and relevant, and losing audience share to people who might disagree with them that they bend over backwards to try to accommodate “both sides” of issues that have one factual stance, or multiple issues with too much nuance to be addressed by five talking heads yapping like miniature poodles for ten minutes straight. The main exception is MSNBC which tries to both be the liberal counterpart to Fox News and be “smart-ish”, which is like trying to make turkey apple pot pie. And none of them can seem to give up their addiction to Trump even though he is about as relevant to current events as Santa Claus on Spring Break in West Palm Beach. At least Jake Tapper speaks in full sentences instead of writing a column that reads like a series of tweets from a gossipy 14 year old girl a la Chris Cillizza.

Stranger

70

You’re only half right.

A good republican president could very well win significant democratic support. A terrible democratic president would lose significant democratic support.

The hyperpartisanship of Republicans means that 38% of the country will always approved of a republican president and disapprove of a democratic president. But democrats are not as partisan as that. If there was a Trump-level disasaster of a president from the democratic party, his approval rating would likely drop below 20% as most democrats abandoned him. But if there were a good republican president - and we haven’t seen that for at least 30 years - I suspect that he would get a significant amount of approval from democrats.

What you describe are the consequences of republican hyper-partisanship. A good democratic presdient can never get above 62% approval rating, and a bad republican president can never go below 38% (more or less). I strongly suspect the opposite is not true, but we have not had a disastrous democratic president, nor a very good republican president in decades which would be required to demonstrate that point.

71

Because Biden was suppose to be the great Uniter…and has done exactly the opposite.

72

I remember how Republicans called Obama “divisive” all the time no matter how much he tried to reach out to them, because they were going to hate him no matter what, and that made him (in their minds) devisive.

73

What figures do you have to support that?

74

“Remember that time Republican leaders in Congress came to the White House and Biden told them to ‘Get the fuck off my lawn!’? No, wait, that was Clint Eastwood in Gran Turino. Never mind.”

Dude, he wore a tan suit! How much more divisive could he get?

Stranger

75

So did Biden.

Check. Mate.

QED.

Adversus solem ne loquitor.

76

To build off that analogy, it would be more like conservatives get 10 penalties called against them while liberals get only 5, which gives a surface appearance of bias against conservatives which conservatives can latch onto, but omits the broader fact that conservatives were committing a lot more fouls.

In other words, conservatives are the Pittsburgh Steelers or Green Bay Packers of U.S. politics.

77

UN…PRESIDENTIAL:

Double-reveverse-mate triple-double dismount reverse flip headstand.

Stranger

78

That’s the brilliance and evil of the Republican strategy. Actually playing fair and calling it like it is looks like fairly extreme bias against Republicans, and trying to make it look more “even” by treating the extreme GOP viewpoint as a normal one is unfair to the Democrats by normalizing the craziness and not calling out for the lunacy it is.

In effect, what they’ve done is to relinquish the center to the Democrats, but by doing so, they’ve made the media “center” somewhere pretty far right of the actual center by way of contrast. Basically the real center as far as actual people and voters hasn’t changed much if at all, but the center of public discourse has, because the media is trying (in good faith) to report on both sides equally.

I’m not sure how you cure this- my inclination isn’t to have the Democratic party pull further left and hope that the media center pulls roughly to the middle; that would recenter the middle, but would STILL leave the vast majority of voters left out of either party. I think the Democrats need to probably play more hardball in terms of the media message, and paint the Republicans as ignorant, crazy, racist and extremists in a much more hardball way than they currently do. Take a page from the GOP’s own playbook and just start opposing their nonsense as the insanity that it is. Like point out just how literally crazy this anti-vaxx stuff is… and just how ignorant it is. They won’t convince the MAGA-tards, but that wouldn’t happen anyway. But maybe the folks in the middle will clue in a little better.

The Democrats also need to be careful about stances and messaging that may be right, but that can be easily misconstrued. They need a coherent statement and concept of what things are, and hammer that against the GOP’s deliberate misinterpretations of them. For example, critical race theory and structural racism aren’t anything all that remarkable or even necessarily hostile to current white people when you understand them. But they can easily be painted as some kind of indictment of today’s white people for the sins of their fathers, which is what the GOP is trying to do. The Democrats need a coherent message about why that’s NOT the case, and what they’re actually trying to do.

The hard part for the Democrats is going to be getting that coherent message decided, suppressing internal party dissent about that coherent message, and getting enough media traction to spread that coherent message. And that coherent message desperately needs to be something centrist-enough to not scare the center that’s already been lumped in with the Democrats anyway.

In other words, use the media’s tendency to present both sides as equal, and give equal time to both, to portray the GOP as crazy, ignorant, lunatic hicks who are coming up with dangerously crazy policies.

79

This made me curious and since I had a bit of time, I did some searching.

When you seach on Biden “Great unifier” you find, almost exclusively, far-right shouters mocking Biden. Look down that page. Marc Thiessen. Gateway Pundit. TigerDroppings. Greg Gutfield. Clicking on the unknowns just puts you deeper into the sewage.

Certainly, Biden campaigned on unifying the public. Before and after the election he’s been trying to appeal to exactly the centrists that Bump is talking about. Mocking him for wanting to do what presidents should want to do only shows the mindless extremism on the right.

80

Cillizza is just annoying. There’s nothing of substance to his “analysis”.