I think two things are being missed in the discourse surrounding this piece—and, more broadly, in the preliminary discourse surrounding Biden's presidential legacy.
First, the assessment of a presidential tenure has to be evaluatively tethered to the exigencies of the moment. In absolute terms, Biden's presidency contains many highlights. But when we consider his four years in relation to the authoritarian pall that Trump and his movement have cast over society, a pall that has only grown since he first appeared on the scene and that now hovers more threateningly above our politics than it ever has before, Biden's electoral and governing missteps that Shikha pointed out are incredibly damning. The country didn't need Obama's third term—the country needed Biden to insist on an electoral succession plan calibrated for maximum effectiveness against a resurgent Trumpian movement and it needed authoritarian proofing. It got neither.
There are many presidencies we look back on fondly while also recognizing that if, say, we were to replace Abraham Lincoln's tenure in which he presided over the Civil War with any of them, those same presidencies would be catastrophically inadequate in meeting the moment. We had four years in office since Trump's emergence and we needed the one leading us during those four years to do more to thwart Trump's *reemergence*. Biden staying in the electoral matchup long after he should have stepped aside made it much harder to keep Trump from regaining office, and Biden's actions *in office* did not do enough to thwart a future Trump presidency should he regain it. You can argue that this isn't the only metric by which we should judge Biden's time in office, but arguing that we shouldn't evaluatively factor in these missteps which have now led to us having Trump again is tribal nonsense. The bottom line is that it is precisely *because* Trump is an unprecedented threat to American democracy that we must view Biden's presidency as at least in some respects a failure.
Second, there is nothing in Shikha's argument that requires laying most of the blame for Trump's second term at Biden's doorstep. In the Great Hierarchy of Blame, it's obvious that GOP officeholders, right-wing media (including major personalities and influencers), and many other factors were more responsible for Trump's durability. But the point here is that Biden ought to receive some of the blame as well. We don't know what would've happened if Democrats had run a proper "let's find our next leader" process. But here's what I can guarantee you: It would've certainly gone better than handing the baton over to the VP with a couple months to go before Election Day. And I can't tell you definitively that Biden's efforts to kill rather than embrace bipartisan efforts at surveilance reform would've resulted in Trump finding himself truly constrained in office. But here's what I can guarantee you: It certainly would have helped. But of course none of this means Biden is principally to blame for Trump's reemergence atop our politics.
There probably isn't an outlet out there that on a per-piece basis has more consistently called out Trump and his movement than we have. Readers who are taking this article to be downplaying the sins of the MAGA movement are simply not operating in good faith. We're frustrated with Biden's tenure precisely because we think the moment called for a stronger plan of action against the threat that Trump poses.
While I agree with you I think you do not give the rest of the Democrats enough blame. True Biden did not work hard to rebuild the guardrails or reform the systems that needed to be reformed. His appointment of Garland alone is disqualifying.
But the fact is that the Democratic party as a whole, and their leadership in particular deserves equal blame. Pelosi, Schumer, Clyburn et al. could have demanded that democracy protection be the first and only job of their chambers. All three have ample experience tacking on changes to "must pass" legislation and yet they did not. In fact on balance Pelosi seems to have fought much harder to keep younger Dems from reforming the committee system than she fought to keep Trump from upending the entire democratic system.
To me it seems as if they rested on the expectation of Biden, McConnell and Garland. All acted as if this was just a bad moment and that Trump was someone else's problem to solve, just so long as they can continue to fund-raise. So now they all are blindsided, shellshocked, and capitulating in advance.
Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, in whatever fashion or style you think would have been appropriate, would not have prevented the tidal wave. A Pyrrhic victory, a much better "look", but it would never have been sufficient. Arguably the first shot was Brexit; Conservatives in power, let's cut immigration and get rid of those loser, thieving Euro folks. Sound familiar? And this was 8 years ago! Unfortunately as it turns out they shot themselves in the foot, or kneecap more like. Now look around the world: Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, Korea, the Netherlands and more. What happened here happened everywhere else. Hint: Biden was only in charge in the US. NOBODY has a CLUE what to do in the face of the massive, universal, all-sectors uncertainty generated by the 4th Industrial (digital) Revolution. And sadly that all gets magnified by the massive, universal, all-sectors uncertainty and disruption of Climate Change, about which we also seem to be either clueless, impotent or both. EVERYTHING is changing horribly rapidly, and the emotional answer to that is a conservative return to the past, to make "America Great Again", details be damned. Time to journey out of the silos and look at the bigger picture for a better understanding.
Yes, history will not be kind to Biden. He ran as a centrist, and was elected with a razor-thin margin, yet still decided to act like the second coming of FDR.
You do a far better job than I could listing his failures, but I disagree with the assessment of the Hunter pardon. I don't think it's justified, but I likely would've done the same for my child in his position. I disagree that it will embolden the Orange One. He already abused the power to a much greater degree in his first term. The right-wing media is blind to its own hypocrisy and completely immune to irony.
Well said Shikha. Biden was originally a centrist/moderate but his position changed because of the party's direction towards a more progressive nature. Although I see similarities in how Trudeau and Biden led their countries post-COVID, and that Biden should have kept his promise to be a one-term president instead of leaving it too late, some of his policies, as you alluded, were a failure.
I posted a somewhat similar article this morning about the decline of liberal democracy and what that means for the Liberal Party of Canada; its upcoming election would have detrimental effects, especially regarding another Quebec referendum.
It pains me to agree with this piece, but the piece is obviously right. At best, one could argue that Biden's presidency was a tactical success but a strategic failure. I don't really even believe that though - he did shave ome significant successes but also some major failures.
This was a thoughtful article Charlie. Biden did some good things, but he ultimately will go down in history as a failed President. Why? Some of his actions and non actions resulted in a traitorous criminal felon returning to the White House. A fair assessment or not, the damage is about to come to bear. Biden and his advisors committed the ultimate mistake. They were supremely overconfident. They still are. Biden and his team still believe they would have won if he would not have left the race. I believe he should not have run again. After stabilizing the economy and the country as much as possible in his first year, he should have tried to pass major Executive reforms. The people would have been with him. Many Republicans in Congress would have been willing to listen to his proposals. Joe became a victim of his own political ambitions. Many people forgot how much he had relished the Presidency since he was young. Once he finally achieved his dream, he could not let the idea of a 2nd term go. His hubris has now cost us all. Everything he succeeded in will be overshadowed by allowing the country to be exposed to a second round of torment and abuse. Hopefully, the country will rebound quickly after enduring what should not have been.
You’re blaming Biden for causing the loss of an election against the guy who was buying votes for $1 million a pop? And against claims that men dressed as women would be lurking in women’s restrooms? And against claims that children would come home from school with a different sex than the one they had when they went to school in the morning?
She's (correctly) blaming Biden for failing at his main task, which was this: "to give his party its best shot at preventing Trump from becoming his successor and, if he did, then erecting as many roadblocks in his way to stop him from abusing his office’s awesome powers."
This isn't *always* a president's main task. In fact, it hardly ever has been a president's main task. But it certainly is an opposition president's main task in the era of Trump. And Biden failed on this front.
Yes and no. As a conservative I voted for Biden simply to restore normalcy to the Executive Branch of Government. The SUCCESSFUL reemergence of Trump was something that while always possible was not fully anticipated. There was some confidence that Republicans could and would move on from Trump. So making one's entire governing principle to be stopping Trump was not in the cards even when it became clear that was the direction that the Republican Party (and half the American people) were headed.
My only hope had been that Biden would only serve for one term and would work to see a solid candidate (not an easy task given the field of likely volunteers) chosen in 2024 regardless of who the Republicans put up. But I am not confident anyone bearing the toxic brand of "Democrat" would have fared better than did Harris.
Given that there was always a solid chance that Trump would come back, and that even without him the GOP had developed a taste for strongmen, there needed to be a fundamental mentality shift among Dems to truly make this election about democracy versus authoritarianism and change their governing priorities to defending democracy. But they never could pivot.
The democrats sold us on saving Democracy, and then proceeded to implement the same old bag of tired lefty priorities like "green" jobs, spenduli, banning gas stoves, etc.
Worse, they (and Biden) talked the talk but did not walk the walk, undermining their message.
Biden talked democracy, but then he ran for reelection in an unfit state, and after that disastrous debate, he was asked "What if you lose?" and he said "As long as I gave it my all, it's OK" or something like that. You can't can't call Trump an existential threat on the one hand and then say it is OK if you lose on the other.
Then he did an Oval Office smiling photo op with Trump after the election.
I was very much appreciative of Biden for his first couple of years in office, but at the end of the day his personal selfishness undermined all of the good he tried to do or could have done.
So when exactly was he supposed to make all these big moves being talked about? I mean was it while trying to wrestle us out of the trump slump brought on by a not at all managed epidemic? Or was it while trying to handle all the myriad problems that arose during his four years? I’ll grant you that he should have stuck to his plan to only run for one successful term while supporting a viable candidate to follow him but I’m not about to throw mud on his administration at this point before he leaves office. History has a long lens but living in the land of Shoulda Woulda Coulda is, in my book, an argument for losers.
So then you’re saying the three examples I cited above are just part of your game? The “successful reemergence of Trump” relied in part on such unmitigated skullduggery. What doors of happiness can money-speech fail to unlock? Elon knows this more every day. Ask his children.
On the first point, even with Musk's spending the fact is that Harris spent far more. Her total budget was north of 1.5 billion. Estimates of rental cost on the dome run to 600k per week! So on that point at least the Democrats do not come out looking good.
True Harris did no vote buying but even with Musk's lottery in place the total spending still dwarfed the Trump campaign. And given that he only paid off a handful that did not make the difference.
In my opinion, Biden's decision to run for re-election will be remembered as one of the most vain, egotistical, and damaging decisions ever made made by a US president. Of course, he may not have had all his marbles, in which case blame must fall on his handlers. If he had past the torch in a primary, he coulda been a hero, instead of a bum, which is what he is.
How much of it was his senility? That's a good question. If he's gone enough, maybe his handlers couldn't sway him either? Maybe it was time to invoke the 25th amendment? I'm hoping we'll find out at some point.
The broad premise is weak, seeing an election loss - something very normal in our system - as a failed presidency. Some specific critiques within have some weight, but they don't make a case for that broad premise. And some specific critiques, such as using emergency powers to deal with an actual emergency like the pandemic being an abuse, fall entirely flat.
Nice of you to come down from your ivory tower to offer your depressing take at a time when it is the last thing any one needs to read. What good will your piece do? No good. You are that kvetching funeral guest who never should have turned up in the first place. Go back upstairs to your tower and continue your deep think.
Just a ridiculous article. While most of us readers can agree that we have various things we wish he’d done differently (fight more, cut off Israel until they get rid of genocidal Netanyahu, etc), your article is, I repeat, ridiculous. First of all, this was all started with Reagan getting away with eliminating the Fairness Doctrine, thus opening the way for all kinds of liars and demagogues using taxpayer-paid, public-access radio and internet channels to build their repulsive power bases. So many other things, but a major one was the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United (corporations are people), opening the way to unrestricted money into elections. Major major deal. There are so many Republicans to be mad at. And so many oligarchs. And though I love him, Obama should have made a huge stink about stolen Supreme Court seats. But Dem Presidents’ hands are tied by the strength of the corporate stranglehold over both parties. Say this out loud: young people need to VOTE, vote for DEMOCRATS, and then shape the policies of that party. Take it over. Unless you want the huge and dangerous period of instability and possibly irrevocable ruin we face while some yet unknown third party rises to power. That could be (will be?) an unparalleled period of thuggery.
I agree with much of what you said, especially regarding Israel. He lost a lot of Democratic voters by failing to oppose N. In that way and in others, he couldn’t or wouldn’t let go of the way things were in the past.
It was literally the law. the fairness doctrine only applied to broadcast media because the federal government is the entity that licenses broadcast spectrum. Same for radio.
Yeah but the government developed internet technology, and could have regulated it and not just give it away with no regulatory strings attached. More oligarchy. Ugh
Biden will no doubt go down as a failed president (arguably among the biggest), but it won’t be for the reasons this writer states & almost all for the reasons Unpopulist is congenitally incapable of seeing or acknowledging, as usual. Carrying water for some of the most illiberal leftist politicians & movements in American history because of truly deranged Trump hatred is the farthest thing from actual liberalism or objectivity, whatever else it is.
This argument sets up the wrong expectations for American political leaders. Every President is going to make decisions that are not optimal for the country's interest or according to your personal political preferences. We shouldn't expect politicians to have divine foresight or god-like powers.
The "blame" framing puts the focus on the wrong parties here. If we care about the defense of institutions, it is not Biden or normie Democrats who have betrayed us, but the Republicans who have allowed the moral and democratic collapse of their party; Trump couldn't have run again if Mitch McConnell had convicted him, or the Supreme Court decided that the text of the Constitution mattered. We also shouldn't forget the media institutions and social media companies who have fostered a toxic information environment for the general public; Biden's unpopularity had less to do with his specific actions or policies and more to do with aggregate media framing of news events and cultural narratives.
But even this lets the real culprits off the hook. It is the voting public that has ultimate responsibility. Biden and Harris, whatever their faults, would have carried on the American political norms that have served this country for almost 250 years to great success. The voters chose Trump -- who promised not to do that. The chose an obviously evil person to lead us, and overlooked his numerous failures in government and in business. Voters have agency. We're never going to overcome this budding authoritarian movement in the US unless *we* take responsibility for its emergence, both collectively and in our individual lives. Accountability starts at home.
The problem I have with this type of article is that, since the summer of 2021, we've seen cycle after cycle of mainstream media and social media influencers shitting on Biden. I think this discourse posture has done greater harm done to the movement to protect democracy than anything that Biden has done himself, or would have ever been inclined to do. So, yeah, sure, I'm not keen on a number of his policy and messaging decisions, but these things are pretty low on the list of national failures over the same time period. Biden has also done a lot of good stuff, and the country has greatly benefitted from his leadership. My position is that it's more harmful to misallocate blame for those larger failures than it is to be "honest" about your disagreements with Biden, because that shifts attention away from whom we should expect to take responsibility going forward.
"We the People" shouldn't be taken as a slogan that enables us to bitch about our leaders. It exhorts us to take direct responsibility for our civic reality. Trump isn't assuming power behind a military junta in 10 days. We picked this man. We are responsible. Moral strength means confronting this fact as centrally important. This framing should be the underlying premise of everything that gets written about what comes next, among those who care about liberal democracy.
The problem with this article isn't the specific criticisms; either I agree with them or am willing to entertain Ms. Dalmia's objections. It's the framing. Sure, in retrospect, there are a bunch of things that Biden could have done differently, and maybe they would have made the difference. Or maybe they wouldn't have. Anyone claiming certain knowledge about this is full of it. And anyways, what does it matter now? How does it inform what actions other political actors are going to take forward?
So many "independent" commentators were going to drag him for anything he did and regardless of outcome, while making no effort to attend to their own contribution to collective decision-making. It's the mis-framing of Biden, here and everywhere else, that has done more damage to our democracy than anything this article spells out. Because we've created a "vibe" that makes any Democrat and anything any Democrat might want to do toxic. Anyone doing political commentary who actually cares to understand why Democrats lost the election really needs to do some deep self-reflection before writing these recriminatory articles.
Harsh, Shikha, harsh. Thoughtful as always. Some of what you say is true. There probably are many things he could have and should have done. But to place the Herculean task of saving liberal democracy upon his shoulders seems like too much.
Ultimately I place the burden on the shoulders of the American electorate. The majority of Americans don't know or care about the preservation of liberal democracy, rarely have concerns about surveillance as long as it is simply abstract to them personally, and generally vote not on rational notions of good governance but on how they feel about their preferred candidate. Therefore the blinded themselves by the lies they were told.
A series of Congresses have allowed the Executive Branch the power to do what is too politically painful for them to decide and do themselves. There is no expansion of Executive authority that has not been ceded and handed over by Congress. The Courts even recognize that challenges to the Executive authority are undercut by the failure of Congress to place limits which are fully within its own power to do.
The last Congress had no interest in helping Biden govern and the next Congress will have no interest in asserting itself against Trump.
Also history is written by the winners. There are whole think tanks working on rewriting the history of Biden as the greatest failed Presidency in history and revising the history of the first Trump administration as the greatest in 100 years. Chances are we will never know the real political history of the first half of the 21st century.
I think two things are being missed in the discourse surrounding this piece—and, more broadly, in the preliminary discourse surrounding Biden's presidential legacy.
First, the assessment of a presidential tenure has to be evaluatively tethered to the exigencies of the moment. In absolute terms, Biden's presidency contains many highlights. But when we consider his four years in relation to the authoritarian pall that Trump and his movement have cast over society, a pall that has only grown since he first appeared on the scene and that now hovers more threateningly above our politics than it ever has before, Biden's electoral and governing missteps that Shikha pointed out are incredibly damning. The country didn't need Obama's third term—the country needed Biden to insist on an electoral succession plan calibrated for maximum effectiveness against a resurgent Trumpian movement and it needed authoritarian proofing. It got neither.
There are many presidencies we look back on fondly while also recognizing that if, say, we were to replace Abraham Lincoln's tenure in which he presided over the Civil War with any of them, those same presidencies would be catastrophically inadequate in meeting the moment. We had four years in office since Trump's emergence and we needed the one leading us during those four years to do more to thwart Trump's *reemergence*. Biden staying in the electoral matchup long after he should have stepped aside made it much harder to keep Trump from regaining office, and Biden's actions *in office* did not do enough to thwart a future Trump presidency should he regain it. You can argue that this isn't the only metric by which we should judge Biden's time in office, but arguing that we shouldn't evaluatively factor in these missteps which have now led to us having Trump again is tribal nonsense. The bottom line is that it is precisely *because* Trump is an unprecedented threat to American democracy that we must view Biden's presidency as at least in some respects a failure.
Second, there is nothing in Shikha's argument that requires laying most of the blame for Trump's second term at Biden's doorstep. In the Great Hierarchy of Blame, it's obvious that GOP officeholders, right-wing media (including major personalities and influencers), and many other factors were more responsible for Trump's durability. But the point here is that Biden ought to receive some of the blame as well. We don't know what would've happened if Democrats had run a proper "let's find our next leader" process. But here's what I can guarantee you: It would've certainly gone better than handing the baton over to the VP with a couple months to go before Election Day. And I can't tell you definitively that Biden's efforts to kill rather than embrace bipartisan efforts at surveilance reform would've resulted in Trump finding himself truly constrained in office. But here's what I can guarantee you: It certainly would have helped. But of course none of this means Biden is principally to blame for Trump's reemergence atop our politics.
There probably isn't an outlet out there that on a per-piece basis has more consistently called out Trump and his movement than we have. Readers who are taking this article to be downplaying the sins of the MAGA movement are simply not operating in good faith. We're frustrated with Biden's tenure precisely because we think the moment called for a stronger plan of action against the threat that Trump poses.
While I agree with you I think you do not give the rest of the Democrats enough blame. True Biden did not work hard to rebuild the guardrails or reform the systems that needed to be reformed. His appointment of Garland alone is disqualifying.
But the fact is that the Democratic party as a whole, and their leadership in particular deserves equal blame. Pelosi, Schumer, Clyburn et al. could have demanded that democracy protection be the first and only job of their chambers. All three have ample experience tacking on changes to "must pass" legislation and yet they did not. In fact on balance Pelosi seems to have fought much harder to keep younger Dems from reforming the committee system than she fought to keep Trump from upending the entire democratic system.
To me it seems as if they rested on the expectation of Biden, McConnell and Garland. All acted as if this was just a bad moment and that Trump was someone else's problem to solve, just so long as they can continue to fund-raise. So now they all are blindsided, shellshocked, and capitulating in advance.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-152551865
Plenty of blame to go around, certainly.
Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, in whatever fashion or style you think would have been appropriate, would not have prevented the tidal wave. A Pyrrhic victory, a much better "look", but it would never have been sufficient. Arguably the first shot was Brexit; Conservatives in power, let's cut immigration and get rid of those loser, thieving Euro folks. Sound familiar? And this was 8 years ago! Unfortunately as it turns out they shot themselves in the foot, or kneecap more like. Now look around the world: Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, Korea, the Netherlands and more. What happened here happened everywhere else. Hint: Biden was only in charge in the US. NOBODY has a CLUE what to do in the face of the massive, universal, all-sectors uncertainty generated by the 4th Industrial (digital) Revolution. And sadly that all gets magnified by the massive, universal, all-sectors uncertainty and disruption of Climate Change, about which we also seem to be either clueless, impotent or both. EVERYTHING is changing horribly rapidly, and the emotional answer to that is a conservative return to the past, to make "America Great Again", details be damned. Time to journey out of the silos and look at the bigger picture for a better understanding.
Yes, history will not be kind to Biden. He ran as a centrist, and was elected with a razor-thin margin, yet still decided to act like the second coming of FDR.
You do a far better job than I could listing his failures, but I disagree with the assessment of the Hunter pardon. I don't think it's justified, but I likely would've done the same for my child in his position. I disagree that it will embolden the Orange One. He already abused the power to a much greater degree in his first term. The right-wing media is blind to its own hypocrisy and completely immune to irony.
Well said Shikha. Biden was originally a centrist/moderate but his position changed because of the party's direction towards a more progressive nature. Although I see similarities in how Trudeau and Biden led their countries post-COVID, and that Biden should have kept his promise to be a one-term president instead of leaving it too late, some of his policies, as you alluded, were a failure.
I posted a somewhat similar article this morning about the decline of liberal democracy and what that means for the Liberal Party of Canada; its upcoming election would have detrimental effects, especially regarding another Quebec referendum.
It pains me to agree with this piece, but the piece is obviously right. At best, one could argue that Biden's presidency was a tactical success but a strategic failure. I don't really even believe that though - he did shave ome significant successes but also some major failures.
This was a thoughtful article Charlie. Biden did some good things, but he ultimately will go down in history as a failed President. Why? Some of his actions and non actions resulted in a traitorous criminal felon returning to the White House. A fair assessment or not, the damage is about to come to bear. Biden and his advisors committed the ultimate mistake. They were supremely overconfident. They still are. Biden and his team still believe they would have won if he would not have left the race. I believe he should not have run again. After stabilizing the economy and the country as much as possible in his first year, he should have tried to pass major Executive reforms. The people would have been with him. Many Republicans in Congress would have been willing to listen to his proposals. Joe became a victim of his own political ambitions. Many people forgot how much he had relished the Presidency since he was young. Once he finally achieved his dream, he could not let the idea of a 2nd term go. His hubris has now cost us all. Everything he succeeded in will be overshadowed by allowing the country to be exposed to a second round of torment and abuse. Hopefully, the country will rebound quickly after enduring what should not have been.
THis is a very convincing argument. Unfortunately, what you say rings very true. So incredibly sad!!!
You’re blaming Biden for causing the loss of an election against the guy who was buying votes for $1 million a pop? And against claims that men dressed as women would be lurking in women’s restrooms? And against claims that children would come home from school with a different sex than the one they had when they went to school in the morning?
She's (correctly) blaming Biden for failing at his main task, which was this: "to give his party its best shot at preventing Trump from becoming his successor and, if he did, then erecting as many roadblocks in his way to stop him from abusing his office’s awesome powers."
This isn't *always* a president's main task. In fact, it hardly ever has been a president's main task. But it certainly is an opposition president's main task in the era of Trump. And Biden failed on this front.
Yes and no. As a conservative I voted for Biden simply to restore normalcy to the Executive Branch of Government. The SUCCESSFUL reemergence of Trump was something that while always possible was not fully anticipated. There was some confidence that Republicans could and would move on from Trump. So making one's entire governing principle to be stopping Trump was not in the cards even when it became clear that was the direction that the Republican Party (and half the American people) were headed.
My only hope had been that Biden would only serve for one term and would work to see a solid candidate (not an easy task given the field of likely volunteers) chosen in 2024 regardless of who the Republicans put up. But I am not confident anyone bearing the toxic brand of "Democrat" would have fared better than did Harris.
Given that there was always a solid chance that Trump would come back, and that even without him the GOP had developed a taste for strongmen, there needed to be a fundamental mentality shift among Dems to truly make this election about democracy versus authoritarianism and change their governing priorities to defending democracy. But they never could pivot.
The democrats sold us on saving Democracy, and then proceeded to implement the same old bag of tired lefty priorities like "green" jobs, spenduli, banning gas stoves, etc.
Worse, they (and Biden) talked the talk but did not walk the walk, undermining their message.
Biden talked democracy, but then he ran for reelection in an unfit state, and after that disastrous debate, he was asked "What if you lose?" and he said "As long as I gave it my all, it's OK" or something like that. You can't can't call Trump an existential threat on the one hand and then say it is OK if you lose on the other.
Then he did an Oval Office smiling photo op with Trump after the election.
I was very much appreciative of Biden for his first couple of years in office, but at the end of the day his personal selfishness undermined all of the good he tried to do or could have done.
So when exactly was he supposed to make all these big moves being talked about? I mean was it while trying to wrestle us out of the trump slump brought on by a not at all managed epidemic? Or was it while trying to handle all the myriad problems that arose during his four years? I’ll grant you that he should have stuck to his plan to only run for one successful term while supporting a viable candidate to follow him but I’m not about to throw mud on his administration at this point before he leaves office. History has a long lens but living in the land of Shoulda Woulda Coulda is, in my book, an argument for losers.
So then you’re saying the three examples I cited above are just part of your game? The “successful reemergence of Trump” relied in part on such unmitigated skullduggery. What doors of happiness can money-speech fail to unlock? Elon knows this more every day. Ask his children.
Truth
On the first point, even with Musk's spending the fact is that Harris spent far more. Her total budget was north of 1.5 billion. Estimates of rental cost on the dome run to 600k per week! So on that point at least the Democrats do not come out looking good.
Musk was giving $1-million to an individual voter daily. This is vote-buying. Harris did no vote buying. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/elon-musk-kicks-off-daily-million-dollar-giveaways-signers-pro-trump-petition.amp
True Harris did no vote buying but even with Musk's lottery in place the total spending still dwarfed the Trump campaign. And given that he only paid off a handful that did not make the difference.
In my opinion, Biden's decision to run for re-election will be remembered as one of the most vain, egotistical, and damaging decisions ever made made by a US president. Of course, he may not have had all his marbles, in which case blame must fall on his handlers. If he had past the torch in a primary, he coulda been a hero, instead of a bum, which is what he is.
How much of it was his senility? That's a good question. If he's gone enough, maybe his handlers couldn't sway him either? Maybe it was time to invoke the 25th amendment? I'm hoping we'll find out at some point.
The broad premise is weak, seeing an election loss - something very normal in our system - as a failed presidency. Some specific critiques within have some weight, but they don't make a case for that broad premise. And some specific critiques, such as using emergency powers to deal with an actual emergency like the pandemic being an abuse, fall entirely flat.
Nice of you to come down from your ivory tower to offer your depressing take at a time when it is the last thing any one needs to read. What good will your piece do? No good. You are that kvetching funeral guest who never should have turned up in the first place. Go back upstairs to your tower and continue your deep think.
Super hate this post, just based on the headline. How is this useful or helpful? What do you hope people will learn from this?
Just a ridiculous article. While most of us readers can agree that we have various things we wish he’d done differently (fight more, cut off Israel until they get rid of genocidal Netanyahu, etc), your article is, I repeat, ridiculous. First of all, this was all started with Reagan getting away with eliminating the Fairness Doctrine, thus opening the way for all kinds of liars and demagogues using taxpayer-paid, public-access radio and internet channels to build their repulsive power bases. So many other things, but a major one was the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United (corporations are people), opening the way to unrestricted money into elections. Major major deal. There are so many Republicans to be mad at. And so many oligarchs. And though I love him, Obama should have made a huge stink about stolen Supreme Court seats. But Dem Presidents’ hands are tied by the strength of the corporate stranglehold over both parties. Say this out loud: young people need to VOTE, vote for DEMOCRATS, and then shape the policies of that party. Take it over. Unless you want the huge and dangerous period of instability and possibly irrevocable ruin we face while some yet unknown third party rises to power. That could be (will be?) an unparalleled period of thuggery.
I agree with much of what you said, especially regarding Israel. He lost a lot of Democratic voters by failing to oppose N. In that way and in others, he couldn’t or wouldn’t let go of the way things were in the past.
The Fairness Doctrine never applied to cable TV and would not have applied to social media.
We don’t know if that would have been true, do we? Your point?
It was literally the law. the fairness doctrine only applied to broadcast media because the federal government is the entity that licenses broadcast spectrum. Same for radio.
Yeah but the government developed internet technology, and could have regulated it and not just give it away with no regulatory strings attached. More oligarchy. Ugh
Biden will no doubt go down as a failed president (arguably among the biggest), but it won’t be for the reasons this writer states & almost all for the reasons Unpopulist is congenitally incapable of seeing or acknowledging, as usual. Carrying water for some of the most illiberal leftist politicians & movements in American history because of truly deranged Trump hatred is the farthest thing from actual liberalism or objectivity, whatever else it is.
This argument sets up the wrong expectations for American political leaders. Every President is going to make decisions that are not optimal for the country's interest or according to your personal political preferences. We shouldn't expect politicians to have divine foresight or god-like powers.
The "blame" framing puts the focus on the wrong parties here. If we care about the defense of institutions, it is not Biden or normie Democrats who have betrayed us, but the Republicans who have allowed the moral and democratic collapse of their party; Trump couldn't have run again if Mitch McConnell had convicted him, or the Supreme Court decided that the text of the Constitution mattered. We also shouldn't forget the media institutions and social media companies who have fostered a toxic information environment for the general public; Biden's unpopularity had less to do with his specific actions or policies and more to do with aggregate media framing of news events and cultural narratives.
But even this lets the real culprits off the hook. It is the voting public that has ultimate responsibility. Biden and Harris, whatever their faults, would have carried on the American political norms that have served this country for almost 250 years to great success. The voters chose Trump -- who promised not to do that. The chose an obviously evil person to lead us, and overlooked his numerous failures in government and in business. Voters have agency. We're never going to overcome this budding authoritarian movement in the US unless *we* take responsibility for its emergence, both collectively and in our individual lives. Accountability starts at home.
All that you say is true, which is why it was even more important for Biden to shift his policy priorities to "strengthening democracy." He didn't.
The problem I have with this type of article is that, since the summer of 2021, we've seen cycle after cycle of mainstream media and social media influencers shitting on Biden. I think this discourse posture has done greater harm done to the movement to protect democracy than anything that Biden has done himself, or would have ever been inclined to do. So, yeah, sure, I'm not keen on a number of his policy and messaging decisions, but these things are pretty low on the list of national failures over the same time period. Biden has also done a lot of good stuff, and the country has greatly benefitted from his leadership. My position is that it's more harmful to misallocate blame for those larger failures than it is to be "honest" about your disagreements with Biden, because that shifts attention away from whom we should expect to take responsibility going forward.
"We the People" shouldn't be taken as a slogan that enables us to bitch about our leaders. It exhorts us to take direct responsibility for our civic reality. Trump isn't assuming power behind a military junta in 10 days. We picked this man. We are responsible. Moral strength means confronting this fact as centrally important. This framing should be the underlying premise of everything that gets written about what comes next, among those who care about liberal democracy.
Biden got a lot of shit he did not deserve during course of his Presidency. But the criticism he got in this article, he earned.
The problem with this article isn't the specific criticisms; either I agree with them or am willing to entertain Ms. Dalmia's objections. It's the framing. Sure, in retrospect, there are a bunch of things that Biden could have done differently, and maybe they would have made the difference. Or maybe they wouldn't have. Anyone claiming certain knowledge about this is full of it. And anyways, what does it matter now? How does it inform what actions other political actors are going to take forward?
So many "independent" commentators were going to drag him for anything he did and regardless of outcome, while making no effort to attend to their own contribution to collective decision-making. It's the mis-framing of Biden, here and everywhere else, that has done more damage to our democracy than anything this article spells out. Because we've created a "vibe" that makes any Democrat and anything any Democrat might want to do toxic. Anyone doing political commentary who actually cares to understand why Democrats lost the election really needs to do some deep self-reflection before writing these recriminatory articles.
Absolutely, all people hear is blah blah blah democrats did a bad thing blah blah blah
Harsh, Shikha, harsh. Thoughtful as always. Some of what you say is true. There probably are many things he could have and should have done. But to place the Herculean task of saving liberal democracy upon his shoulders seems like too much.
Ultimately I place the burden on the shoulders of the American electorate. The majority of Americans don't know or care about the preservation of liberal democracy, rarely have concerns about surveillance as long as it is simply abstract to them personally, and generally vote not on rational notions of good governance but on how they feel about their preferred candidate. Therefore the blinded themselves by the lies they were told.
A series of Congresses have allowed the Executive Branch the power to do what is too politically painful for them to decide and do themselves. There is no expansion of Executive authority that has not been ceded and handed over by Congress. The Courts even recognize that challenges to the Executive authority are undercut by the failure of Congress to place limits which are fully within its own power to do.
The last Congress had no interest in helping Biden govern and the next Congress will have no interest in asserting itself against Trump.
Also history is written by the winners. There are whole think tanks working on rewriting the history of Biden as the greatest failed Presidency in history and revising the history of the first Trump administration as the greatest in 100 years. Chances are we will never know the real political history of the first half of the 21st century.
Disagree .