For perspective, I voted for Joe Biden, twice as VP, and once of president. After the election of 2022, when the Dems lost the House, it was obvious that he had lost more than one step in his ability to be the most powerful person in the world.
By early 2023, I was calling for Joe to step aside. Take pride in his great successes during the first two years and tend to smaller successes before leaving office. He could have opened the field to the next generation of Democrats.
The dismal assessment of his presidency as a failure will be because of at least two personal reasons:
1. He made reference during the 2020 election campaign and also early in 2021 that he saw himself as a transition president.
~ He obviously lied to himself and to the country by planning after his early successes with a Democratic House and Senate that he would run for a second term.
2. He continually claimed throughout his presidency that he loved the country dearly, but not enough to have the insight and acceptance of his failing mental capacity.
~ His hamartia*, arrogance, failing mental acuity, and sycophantic inner-circle (his wife, sister, brother, and "trusted" advisors) combined to have him believe a variation of Trump's continued comment, "Only I can fix it," with "Only I can improve it."
* The personal flaw, mistake in judgment, or misstep that leads to a tragic reversal of one's success.
As, such, Biden destroyed any measure of being considered a successful president and instead became a mythological Greek tragedy.
Reasonable and intelligent people know that joe Biden accomplished a lot of good things for the United States of America as time goes we will miss him because Donald Trump wouldn't make a pimple on joe Bidens ass
Bad as Trump is, it's absurd to say he's "the closest thing the country had seen to an authoritarian." FDR had Americans dragged out of their homes en masse and sent to concentration camps for having Japanese ancestry. Wilson had people locked away for years for criticizing his war. Both presidents were worse than Trump.
FDR's action was terrible, taken during the heat of a war. A dark chapter in American history.. But last time I checked, FDR did not concoct deranged legal theories to steal an election; dox election workers doing their jobs and make their lives a living hell; invite his supporters to beat protesters; develop a cadre of local foot soldiers to go after Republicans who challenged him (read David French on this); and of course sic a mob on the Capitol to stay in power egging it on as it wanted to lynch his VP.
I think polling indicated that Trump's threat to democracy was less of a problem than the price of eggs under Biden..
There was, especially in the swing states, a significant amount of "ticket splitting" where people voted for Trump but voted for Democrats in Senate races. This phenomenon helped Biden in 2020 and Trump this time around. Although voter turnout was less in 2024 there may have been some "non-MAGA Republicans" and independents who came home to Trump.
Trump's criminality was an element of the Democratic messaging but polls indicate that most voters (even among Republicans) acknowledged that Trump "may have" broken some laws--- they did not see that as a bar to his election.
Another element Democrats campaigned on was the events relating to January 6. The interpretation of the event is dominated by partisan perspectives. Majorities of all parties acknowledge it was bad but they split on motives, culpability and consequences.
Project 2025 featured heavily in Democratic messaging which is the actual game plan for imposing authoritarianism but again voters were more concerned about the economy.
Immigration issues also dogged the Democrats and the bipartisan bill to address some of those issues arrived 4 years too late. Democrats, when they had the majority and the possibility of strong bipartisan support, failed to show that Trump's wall and draconian policies were not necessary to get a grip on immigration. Since then the false narratives of immigrant criminality, burden on local community resources and pet eating became part of the zeitgeist. Support for building the wall has increased, even among Democrats and Hispanics, since 2020.
So polling drove the Harris campaign toward the economy in the final weeks of the campaign and Trump was able to rewrite his first term as an economic renaissance (but for that COVID thing) and Biden's actually solid economy as a disaster. Neither was true but voters think what voters think.
The only thing I know for sure is that Biden would have fared worse than Harris. It is a curious thing that two "failed" presidencies should bookend this period with the death of Jimmy Carter and the collapse of the Biden administration with everyone in the world acting as if Trump is already the President and Biden unable to assert himself as otherwise.
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.
Leadership requires a leader who can effectively carry the message, even a flawed message. Bidens policies can be debated but overall if we measure it by the economic recovery he did well. Inflation was the fly in his ointment, but no President could have avoided the impact caused by Covid.
The failure to communicate in an age where soundbites carry the day started with Biden and flowed through the ranks. Those better suited to the new reality, the young guns were minimized.
So in a nutshell Biden fell in love with power and those around him deserve to be ousted for not sounding the alarm bells about an increasingly infirm President.
Some may argue there is nothing to be gained in looking back. Nothing could be further from the truth. The party needs a proverbial enima. Nothing less will suffice.
Change will have to come from both the grass roots level to absorb the pulse of the people, and to add expertise in media management at the national level to lever all social platforms effectively.
It was 4 years of media and messaging failure. Ironically Trump is not wrong to attack the media for being fake, they are and Dems shouldn’t be afraid to get out there and challenge their narratives.
Which brings me back to Biden. He may have been the worst communicator to ever hold the office. And above all that’s why the Dems lost power.
Who knew that Haitians eating cats and dogs was a winning campaign strategy.
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.
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.
Yes but acknowledge that this clusterfuck has been a LOnG time coming, and young people not voting or voting for third party candidates played a part in that.
Acknowledge? That's what we've been doing since the inception of this site. That's what we exist to do. But denying that Biden did not face up to the threat -- regardless of how long it was in the making -- is just tribalism.
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.
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.
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
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.
Blaming is bullshit. His legacy is complex and layered.
Unless he stays in power and arrests Trump and team involved in destroying America.
For perspective, I voted for Joe Biden, twice as VP, and once of president. After the election of 2022, when the Dems lost the House, it was obvious that he had lost more than one step in his ability to be the most powerful person in the world.
By early 2023, I was calling for Joe to step aside. Take pride in his great successes during the first two years and tend to smaller successes before leaving office. He could have opened the field to the next generation of Democrats.
The dismal assessment of his presidency as a failure will be because of at least two personal reasons:
1. He made reference during the 2020 election campaign and also early in 2021 that he saw himself as a transition president.
~ He obviously lied to himself and to the country by planning after his early successes with a Democratic House and Senate that he would run for a second term.
2. He continually claimed throughout his presidency that he loved the country dearly, but not enough to have the insight and acceptance of his failing mental capacity.
~ His hamartia*, arrogance, failing mental acuity, and sycophantic inner-circle (his wife, sister, brother, and "trusted" advisors) combined to have him believe a variation of Trump's continued comment, "Only I can fix it," with "Only I can improve it."
* The personal flaw, mistake in judgment, or misstep that leads to a tragic reversal of one's success.
As, such, Biden destroyed any measure of being considered a successful president and instead became a mythological Greek tragedy.
Reasonable and intelligent people know that joe Biden accomplished a lot of good things for the United States of America as time goes we will miss him because Donald Trump wouldn't make a pimple on joe Bidens ass
Bad as Trump is, it's absurd to say he's "the closest thing the country had seen to an authoritarian." FDR had Americans dragged out of their homes en masse and sent to concentration camps for having Japanese ancestry. Wilson had people locked away for years for criticizing his war. Both presidents were worse than Trump.
FDR's action was terrible, taken during the heat of a war. A dark chapter in American history.. But last time I checked, FDR did not concoct deranged legal theories to steal an election; dox election workers doing their jobs and make their lives a living hell; invite his supporters to beat protesters; develop a cadre of local foot soldiers to go after Republicans who challenged him (read David French on this); and of course sic a mob on the Capitol to stay in power egging it on as it wanted to lynch his VP.
I disagree with this
I think polling indicated that Trump's threat to democracy was less of a problem than the price of eggs under Biden..
There was, especially in the swing states, a significant amount of "ticket splitting" where people voted for Trump but voted for Democrats in Senate races. This phenomenon helped Biden in 2020 and Trump this time around. Although voter turnout was less in 2024 there may have been some "non-MAGA Republicans" and independents who came home to Trump.
Trump's criminality was an element of the Democratic messaging but polls indicate that most voters (even among Republicans) acknowledged that Trump "may have" broken some laws--- they did not see that as a bar to his election.
Another element Democrats campaigned on was the events relating to January 6. The interpretation of the event is dominated by partisan perspectives. Majorities of all parties acknowledge it was bad but they split on motives, culpability and consequences.
Project 2025 featured heavily in Democratic messaging which is the actual game plan for imposing authoritarianism but again voters were more concerned about the economy.
Immigration issues also dogged the Democrats and the bipartisan bill to address some of those issues arrived 4 years too late. Democrats, when they had the majority and the possibility of strong bipartisan support, failed to show that Trump's wall and draconian policies were not necessary to get a grip on immigration. Since then the false narratives of immigrant criminality, burden on local community resources and pet eating became part of the zeitgeist. Support for building the wall has increased, even among Democrats and Hispanics, since 2020.
So polling drove the Harris campaign toward the economy in the final weeks of the campaign and Trump was able to rewrite his first term as an economic renaissance (but for that COVID thing) and Biden's actually solid economy as a disaster. Neither was true but voters think what voters think.
The only thing I know for sure is that Biden would have fared worse than Harris. It is a curious thing that two "failed" presidencies should bookend this period with the death of Jimmy Carter and the collapse of the Biden administration with everyone in the world acting as if Trump is already the President and Biden unable to assert himself as otherwise.
https://www.prri.org/research/challenges-to-democracy-the-2024-election-in-focus-findings-from-the-2024-american-values-survey/
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.
Leadership requires a leader who can effectively carry the message, even a flawed message. Bidens policies can be debated but overall if we measure it by the economic recovery he did well. Inflation was the fly in his ointment, but no President could have avoided the impact caused by Covid.
The failure to communicate in an age where soundbites carry the day started with Biden and flowed through the ranks. Those better suited to the new reality, the young guns were minimized.
So in a nutshell Biden fell in love with power and those around him deserve to be ousted for not sounding the alarm bells about an increasingly infirm President.
Some may argue there is nothing to be gained in looking back. Nothing could be further from the truth. The party needs a proverbial enima. Nothing less will suffice.
Change will have to come from both the grass roots level to absorb the pulse of the people, and to add expertise in media management at the national level to lever all social platforms effectively.
It was 4 years of media and messaging failure. Ironically Trump is not wrong to attack the media for being fake, they are and Dems shouldn’t be afraid to get out there and challenge their narratives.
Which brings me back to Biden. He may have been the worst communicator to ever hold the office. And above all that’s why the Dems lost power.
Who knew that Haitians eating cats and dogs was a winning campaign strategy.
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.
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.
Yes but acknowledge that this clusterfuck has been a LOnG time coming, and young people not voting or voting for third party candidates played a part in that.
Acknowledge? That's what we've been doing since the inception of this site. That's what we exist to do. But denying that Biden did not face up to the threat -- regardless of how long it was in the making -- is just tribalism.
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.
Disagree .
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.
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
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.