Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2021 11:33 pm
by Luke
OPINION | POLITICS The Political Weapon Biden Didn’t Deploy
The relief package that Biden barely mentioned in his address gives him—and Democrats—an opportunity they haven’t had for decades.
by Jeff Greenfield
***
The political potential here is impressive. Consider a 2022 midterm where the future of the now-temporary child tax credits is on the line, and where every Republican House and Senate incumbent will have to explain to the electorate why they voted against them. Consider the votes of tens of thousands of small-business owners—the entrepreneurial heart of what Republicans rhetorically celebrate—whose enterprises survived because of the law enacted with a clear partisan split. Imagine a Republican arguing that only a small fraction of the law addressed the costs of the pandemic, when there are countless parents of school-age children, restaurant workers, retail shop owners, hotel clerks, freelance consultants, who know exactly what happened to their lives when Covid struck.
This is a possibility that Republicans simply may not have imagined, given their midterm successes in running against the initiatives of the past two Democratic presidents, and inflicting on Clinton and Obama successive political catastrophes.
This time, the benefits of the new law are easy to grasp, and will be—literally—in the hands of Americans within weeks. The scope is broad enough to encompass both the poor and large elements of the middle class, which is why it now enjoys a level of support almost unimaginable for a law passed along such partisan lines. There is a hint that an outbreak of public happiness may be about to begin; when American Airlines tells its workers to “tear up those furlough notices!”, it portends the chance of celebration with every reopened restaurant, with every eviction notice burned. More broadly, it appears to contain provisions that leapfrog a dilemma that has plagued Democratic social programs in the past: When they are perceived as helping one class of voters, they meet with a powerful backlash, (often one infused by racial resentment). When a program reaches broadly—Social Security, Medicare and, increasingly, the Affordable Care Act—it becomes politically potent.
The DL2XIT supporters are reduced to trying to mock the view counts and deflecting. The number of their tweets is declining rapidly, interesting to watch. For regular Americans, this stuff is popular.
Joe Biden's Approval Rating on COVID Pandemic 18 Points Higher Than Trump's Best: Poll
BY ALEXANDRA HUTZLER ON 3/11/21 AT 4:45 PM EST
President Joe Biden has started his presidency with a higher approval rating on the coronavirus pandemic than his White House predecessor ever achieved, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
The survey, conducted between March 6 and 8, found that 62 percent of Americans approve of how Biden is handling the pandemic. That's 18 points higher than former President Donald Trump's best rating in the poll, in which he earned 44 percent approval in March and April last year.
By the time he left office in January, Trump's approval rating on the coronavirus had dropped to 39 percent.
Biden enjoyed the most support from Democrats, 91 percent of whom approved of his job dealing with the health crisis. Sixty percent of independents also viewed his response to the national epidemic positively.
But he also got some support from Republican voters, as 30 percent approved of his handling of the virus. Twenty-two percent of respondents who voted for Trump in the 2020 election also gave Biden their approval on his coronavirus response.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2021 10:09 am
by Foggy
I'm just going to have to live with the fact that I opposed Biden as the nominee, and was disappointed he won the primaries.
I was wrong, y'all are right. He's perfect for this time in our country's history and I'm enjoying every day that he's President of this great nation.
Sometimes being very, very wrong doesn't have a bad ending.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2021 10:51 am
by zekeb
Foggy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 12, 2021 10:09 am
I'm just going to have to live with the fact that I opposed Biden as the nominee, and was disappointed he won the primaries.
I was wrong, y'all are right. He's perfect for this time in our country's history and I'm enjoying every day that he's President of this great nation.
Sometimes being very, very wrong doesn't have a bad ending.
In retrospect other Democratic candidates could have beaten trump. Before Covid we had to choose the candidate who had the best chance of tossing that big zit out of the WH. I supported Biden for that reason and I have no regrets.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2021 11:18 am
by Luke
POLITICO Playbook: Last night is why Joe Biden won the presidency
By RYAN LIZZA, TARA PALMERI, EUGENE DANIELS and RACHAEL BADE 03/12/2021 06:22 AM EST Updated 03/12/2021 10:53 AM EST
It is hard to imagine any other contemporary politician making the speech Joe Biden did Thursday night — both channeling our collective sorrow and reminding us that there is life after grief.
DRIVING THE DAY
Every president is eventually called upon to help us collectively grieve. JOE BIDEN may be the first president elected to do so. His speech Thursday night had some important policy promises — by May 1 every adult will be eligible for a vaccine and by July Fourth relative normalcy will return. But it is worth taking a moment to dwell on this unique pastoral role of the presidency, if only because it has been absent for the last four years and because Biden is being widely praised for restoring it.
Whether it’s a natural disaster, a war, a terrorist attack, a mass shooting — some devastating event that shocks Americans equally and temporarily suspends the usual divisions — for better or worse we turn to the president not just to push and pull the levers of government in response, but also to console us. The images of those moments are indelible: RONALD REAGAN speaking after the Challenger disaster, BILL CLINTON memorializing the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, GEORGE W. BUSH with a bullhorn on a pile of rubble and BARACK OBAMA wiping away tears describing the Sandy Hook massacre. The image last night of Biden retrieving from his breast pocket his daily schedule on which is written the latest Covid-19 death toll — 527,726 — may one day be a part of that grim pantheon of moments.
If politics is about timing, then there can be nothing more morbidly fortuitous than a politician whose own life has been defined by unimaginable loss coming along precisely when a wave of death was crashing over an America searching for some empathy. By now almost every American knows of someone who died from Covid or someone who died in a way that Covid made worse by isolating them from the person they lost. And though Biden signed a staggeringly ambitious piece of legislation Thursday, he used his evening remarks to speak more to that loss than to the policy details of the recovery plan.
The speech was infused with a set of ideas but not really ideology: unity, self-governance, the virtues of collective action in the face of a common threat and — most of all — moving on from loss: "While it was different for everyone, we all lost something — a collective suffering, a collective sacrifice, a year filled with the loss of life and the loss of living for all of us. But in the loss, we saw how much there was to gain in appreciation, respect and gratitude. Finding light in the darkness is a very American thing to do. In fact, it may be the most American thing we do. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve seen frontline and essential workers risking their lives, sometimes losing them, to save and help others. Researchers and scientists racing for a vaccine. And so many of you, as Hemingway wrote, ‘Being strong in all the broken places.’” That's not exactly the ERNEST HEMINGWAY line, which is from “A Farewell to Arms” and is a little more bleak than how he used it: “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”
But either way it is hard to imagine any other contemporary politician making the speech Biden did Thursday night — both channeling our collective sorrow and reminding us that there is life after grief.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2021 6:14 am
by Lani
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2021 12:11 am
by Lani
Screenshot_2021-03-13 Keith Olbermann on Twitter.png (34.49 KiB) Viewed 5512 times
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2021 3:52 pm
by Luke
Many GOP tears of confusion and frustration.
Poll: Approval of Biden's handling of coronavirus ticks up to 65 percent
President Biden's job approval on the coronavirus pandemic has ticked up to 65 percent, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds.
Sixty-five percent of registered voters in the March 5-8 survey said they approve of the job Biden is doing in handling the virus, a 1 percentage point increase from a Feb. 12-15 survey.
Thirty-five percent said they disapprove of the job Biden is doing on the pandemic.
Biden's overall job approval remains steady at 58 percent.
Thursday, Biden addressed the nation in his first prime-time address as president and urged Americans to show unity in order to effectively snuff out the virus.
The most recent Hill-HarrisX survey was conducted online among 2,839 registered voters. It has a margin of error of 1.84 percentage points.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2021 5:36 pm
by Volkonski
Greg Miller
@gregpmiller
US intel released 2 reports in 2 days on election interference and domestic extremism.
And no one attacked the agencies, called the intel a hoax or fired any analysts.
3:24 PM · Mar 17, 2021·TweetDeck
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2021 12:06 am
by Lani
Brayden reads a poem to his friend and tutor.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2021 8:47 am
by p0rtia
Leadership. It's real.
It's a real thing that matters.
It's back. I missed it.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2021 9:21 am
by neonzx
p0rtia wrote: ↑Thu Mar 18, 2021 8:47 am
Leadership. It's real.
It's a real thing that matters.
It's back. I missed it.
A few of (not all of) my conservative leaning friends have said similar -- and express regret for voting for DFO in the last election.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2021 5:52 pm
by sad-cafe
Foggy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 12, 2021 10:09 am
I'm just going to have to live with the fact that I opposed Biden as the nominee, and was disappointed he won the primaries.
I was wrong, y'all are right. He's perfect for this time in our country's history and I'm enjoying every day that he's President of this great nation.
Sometimes being very, very wrong doesn't have a bad ending.
I have wanted Biden since 2004 but fate has a way of doing the right thing. He is the perfect man for this time
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2021 6:49 pm
by Fiascoist
Biden was my guy in 2008, but immediately switched and supported Obama when it was determined that Joe would not be the candidate. In retrospect, his (Biden) loss at that time allows for our win now. He is what the Country needs now. His manner and character, his calm all are balms for the soul.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Cue the wingnuts saying he's stroked out or some such in 3...2...
Exactly.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 9:54 pm
by noblepa
Fiascoist wrote: ↑Thu Mar 18, 2021 6:49 pm
Biden was my guy in 2008, but immediately switched and supported Obama when it was determined that Joe would not be the candidate. In retrospect, his (Biden) loss at that time allows for our win now. He is what the Country needs now. His manner and character, his calm all are balms for the soul.
The big question, that we'll never know the answer to, is, could Joe Biden have beaten Donald Trump in 2016?
I think that he could have. Hillary just had too much baggage. Much of it was unearned, such as the Benghazi nonsense, and, of course the conspiracy theories that she and Bill had murdered one of their aides.
Too many voters, rightly or not, could not bring themselves to vote for HRC.
Another phenomenon that I think may have happened is similar to reports I saw after the Brexit vote passed unexpectedly. I saw interviews with brits who voted FOR Brexit, as a protest of some sort, believing that it had no chance of passing. When it did, many wanted a do-over.
I think that some voters believed that Hillary was a shoo-in, but they didn't like her and couldn't bring themselves to vote for her. The polls all said that she was going to win by 6-8 points. So, they voted for Trump, thinking "my one vote won't make a difference". Apparently, enough of them did that, and DJT won. There would have been less of that with Biden.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 10:18 pm
by Frater I*I
noblepa wrote: ↑Fri Mar 19, 2021 9:54 pm
The big question, that we'll never know the answer to, is, could Joe Biden have beaten Donald Trump in 2016?
I think that he could have. Hillary just had too much baggage. Much of it was unearned, such as the Benghazi nonsense, and, of course the conspiracy theories that she and Bill had murdered one of their aides.
Too many voters, rightly or not, could not bring themselves to vote for HRC.
Another phenomenon that I think may have happened is similar to reports I saw after the Brexit vote passed unexpectedly. I saw interviews with brits who voted FOR Brexit, as a protest of some sort, believing that it had no chance of passing. When it did, many wanted a do-over.
I think that some voters believed that Hillary was a shoo-in, but they didn't like her and couldn't bring themselves to vote for her. The polls all said that she was going to win by 6-8 points. So, they voted for Trump, thinking "my one vote won't make a difference". Apparently, enough of them did that, and DJT won. There would have been less of that with Biden.
Between the wingnuts spending a quarter of a century generating hate for her, to Trump getting the nomination and her thinking "nobody will elect that reality TV clown" causing her to just phone in her campaign, the "it's my time now, I stepped aside in 08" attitude, and possibly as many as 10% of Sanders supporters voting for Trump to show up the Dems.
I think those are the reason why we got 4 years of nightmare...
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2021 12:44 am
by sterngard friegen
The stumble is suspishus. Just the other day Putin said he wished Uncle Joe good health. Coinkydink? I think not.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2021 5:33 pm
by Luke
Opinion column. Nice to see the DL2XIT supporters so excited to see their president, surely it's because they admire him so much.
Why Biden Waited So Long to Throw the Press a Bone
The media has been baying for a press conference for weeks, but the president knows the public doesn’t care one way or the other.
By JACK SHAFER 03/19/2021 06:15 PM EDT
Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.
Like kenneled dogs who have missed a feeding, White House reporters have been growling and barking over President Joe Biden’s failure to hold a formal press conference since being sworn in. He has kept them waiting so long, he now owns the record for the longest a new president has gone without holding such a presser. He finally acknowledged the yelping this week—maybe Champ and Major conveyed the press hounds’ consternation to him—by finally scheduling a presser for March 25. If you’re a reporter, Biden’s press conference avoidance has been an outrage. Presidential accountability, say the pressies, demands that the chief executive stand and deliver at prescribed and frequent intervals. The press conferences aren’t really for reporters, the reporters would have you believe, but for citizens. “People have a right to see their president regularly answering questions,” ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl told the Washington Post this week. This so-called “right” to see the president answer questions did not exist in theory or practice until late in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first administration, and even then the video elements were subject to White House review and approval before release. It wasn’t until John F. Kennedy’s presidency that the events were carried live on television.
But presidential press conferences are almost never about the public. They’re about letting the press preen a little, to provide a live, broadcast forum where they can ask some sharp-edged questions and maybe get the president to say something newsy or even better: fumble. Biden knows this and he isn’t in any rush to satisfy that urge. That’s because if you’re Biden, press conference avoidance has been a winning political strategy. As he discovered during the presidential campaign, the less people saw him, the more they liked him, and the more they liked him, the more willing they became to vote for him, and all the baying in the world is not going to cause Biden to unlearn that lesson. According to a fresh POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, 62 percent of registered voters give Joe their approval. Biden must be asking himself: Why break a sweat running when coasting is what got you to where you always wanted to go? By limiting his direct exposure to the scrutinizing powers of pressers, Biden has followed the example of his former boss. President Barack Obama famously avoided press conferences by holding only 36 of them in his first term, fewer than Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or Bill Clinton had during their presidencies, as historian Harold Holzer writes in his recent book, The Presidents vs. the Press. If Biden decides to go the full Obama, he’ll do what his predecessor did and fill the news stream with editorial content of the White House’s own making. As Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote for POLITICO in 2013, Obama’s people busied themselves producing in-house photos of the president, videos of White House officials and blog posts by presidential aides and other substitutes for journalism that could “be instantly released to the masses through social media. They often include footage unavailable to the press.” With the possible exception of Kennedy, who waltzed and quipped through his press conferences, presidents seem to dread them. “I will mount the usual weekly cross and let you drive the nails,” said Eisenhower in 1953 as he solicited questions at a presser.
But how painful is the experience? Nobody becomes president without having first applied themselves to the arts of parry and deflection on the campaign trail, so a presidential press conference isn’t the first plunge for any of them. A reasonably prepared president can dull or blunt even the sharpest question from a skilled interrogator like Kaitlin Collins of CNN or Weijia Jiang of CBS News if he puts his mind to it. It’s his house. He decides who gets called on and can cut a reporter off almost at will. He can filibuster all he wants. He can end it whenever he likes. But even though nobody has ever sunk his administration by gaffeing at a presser—consider all the nutty things President Donald Trump said at his press conferences!—the format induces performance anxiety in most presidents. Attribute it to the institutional girth the event has acquired. The press gives them a big buildup; the lights seem brighter; the reporters come packing special rhetorical heat; every presidential twitch, flinch and pause is recorded and analyzed; newspapers give the story prominent play; all the networks cover the event live; and the whole world watches.
Instead of treating formal pressers as the mostly meaningless exhibition games they are, generally forgotten within a week after being staged, presidents insist on compounding their anxiety by foolishly treating the showdowns as elimination matches that might determine the course of their presidencies. Biden’s well-documented tendencies would, somewhat counterintuitively, make him immune to the risks of the high-pressure presser. “I am a gaffe machine,” he confessed back in December 2018, preloading all judgment of him with the understanding that if it’s possible to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, Biden will say it. Just as we discounted any wacky thing Trump said because he was a known liar, we’ve agreed not to hold Biden to his words because we understand he’s as confused by what he’s saying as we are. But just because presidential news conferences don’t crater our memories with significance doesn’t mean they don’t matter. They do. They sometimes put the administration on the record, which is helpful in clarifying government policy. They often elevate the status of underdiscussed issues and give them the benefit of a public hearing. They have even been known to break news. They can also be helpful in disseminating a presidential message. One suspects that Biden has agreed to his presser not to quiet the press pack but because he wants to crow about his legislative victory, his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Democrats who criticized Obama for undertouting his relief plan in 2009 are much pleased by the fanfare Biden will surely trumpet next week.
Biden, who seems to know a thing or two about politics, understands that popular presidents don’t really need press conferences (especially if they can talk over the heads of the press) and that the unpopular presidents who think pressers will increase their approval numbers are only conning themselves. Going into next Thursday’s session, Biden will do fine, by which I mean he won’t start a world war or instruct his press secretary to eject a reporter from the session. Although some conservatives have invested heavily in the pejorative fantasy of Biden as drooling, trip-over-his-own-laces, senile incompetent, they’re likely to be disappointed in his presser performance. He never validated their mockery in his debates with Trump and hasn’t botched a public appearance since being sworn in. Like previous presidents, he’ll respond to most questions by giving the answer to the question he wished he’d been asked, not the one directed at him. He’ll keep the session short but go long on the relief act. We can depend on him gaffe-ing and confusing himself and making jokes that nobody gets because that’s his way. And after having milked the occasion for his political ends, he’ll slip away and won’t return until the growling and barking peak once more and he finds a new reason to throw the beasts some fresh meat.
Biden knows what works and he's not going to let RWNJs or fame-hungry press distract him. Psaki is doing dailies, which is 100x more than DL2XIT did. So cool it.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 10:56 am
by Lani
Screenshot_2021-03-21 Eric Boehlert on Twitter.png (21.87 KiB) Viewed 4980 times
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:31 pm
by Luke
Maureen Dowd today (including it all since many don't have NY Times access). She is always a brat, she wrote lots of negative pieces about Biden including spreading around oppo research on him. But whatever. Reading through, there were some links and went back and reviewed them, there's some interesting background that hadn't thought about in a while. Looks like the Obama team was pretty tough on Biden.
Politico profile from 2014 called "Joe Biden in Winter" By GLENN THRUSH March/April 2014" about what would happen with HRC and the fallout from Biden declaring support for gay marriage: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... le-103667/
2013 GQ profile: Have You Heard the One About President Joe Biden?
That's No Joke. Consider: He is the most quietly effective politician in D.C. (Don't laugh.) The "Most Influential Vice President in History." (Seriously, stop laughing.) One of our nation's most senior statesmen. (Look it up!) So why is the man who could be the next president also the butt of so many jokes? Jeanne Marie Laskas gets to know the most misunderstood man in Washington.
BY JEANNE MARIE LASKAS July 18, 2013 https://www.gq.com/story/joe-biden-pres ... table=true
It's really something that after so much adversity, with so many counting him out, this miraculous 2020 election happened that played to his strengths and brought the right man to the White House at the right time.
Old Pol, New Tricks
Biden’s got the buzz. Who’s smirking now?
By Maureen Dowd Opinion Columnist March 20, 2021
WASHINGTON — Joe Biden never had a seat at the cool kids’ table at the Obama White House.
Heading into 2016 and 2020, if you told the hotshots from Obamaworld that you thought Biden would be a good candidate, they would uniformly offer a look of infinite patience, tolerance and condescension and say something like, “Well, I could understand how someone would think that.”
The message was unmistakable: Biden was not part of the Obama entourage. He was sort of a goofball and windbag. He was a member of an older, outmoded generation. In other words, uncool.
The West Wing attitude was that Biden should simply be grateful that the Great Obama had handed him a ticket to ride. Biden was viewed as a past-his-sell-by-date pol who needed the president’s guiding hand to keep Uncle Joe from making a fool of himself as vice president.
In 2012, Biden faced “friendly fire” from the West Wing, as one outraged Biden family member put it to me back then. Obama aides were furious when Biden went on “Meet the Press” and made a glorious gaffe, blurting out support for gay marriage while his boss was still dragging his feet. They trashed him anonymously to reporters, froze him out of meetings and barred him from doing some national media.
“Being managed into a box by Obama’s cocky campaign team only exacerbated Biden’s innate insecurity and drive for independence,” Glenn Thrush wrote in Politico in 2014.
In eight years, Biden said in a recent reveal that stunned Anderson Cooper — and left Washington gasping — he and Jill were never invited by the Obamas to their private digs in the White House.
Despite a secret poll to see if he should be dropped as veep in favor of Hillary in 2012, despite being pushed aside by Barack Obama for Hillary in 2016, and despite not getting an endorsement from his erstwhile partner in his uphill primary fight in 2020 until he was the last candidate standing, Biden refused to go gentle into that good night, to quote one of his favorite lines of poetry.
With a boost from Black Democrats, if not the most famous one, Biden achieved what pretty much no one — especially bratty Obama disciples — had thought possible. At 78, nearly half a century after he arrived in D.C. as a senator, he became the oldest man ever sworn in as president.
So now comes a delicious twist: President Biden is being hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-generation progressive champion, with comparisons to L.B.J. and F.D.R. aplenty, while Obama has become a cautionary tale about what happens when Democrats get the keys to the car but don’t put their foot on the gas.
The collective smirk was wiped off the face of Obamaworld this past week, as former aides expressed their irritation at the retrospective dissing, and while Biden’s inner circle enjoyed an unfamiliar sensation: schadenfreude. Now the friendly fire once aimed at Biden is coming toward Obama.
All month long, Democrats have been trashing Obama for the size of his itty-bitty 2009 stimulus bill — Chuck Schumer called it “small” and “measly” — and his refusal to sell it to the public.
Now, after President Biden passed the $1.9 trillion cornucopia of liberal delights, Democrats are thinking that if he keeps it up, they’ll soon be picking up their chisels to carve his face on Mount Rushmore, right in the spot Obama must have been picturing for himself.
Creaky, old-fashioned Joe moved fast and broke things. Unlike the sleek, modern Obama, who kept trying to work with obstructionist Republicans, Biden blew them off, calling it “an easy choice.”
Progressives, who had fretted that Biden would govern in a centrist hell, trapped in a sepia, split-the-difference Washington where Mitch McConnell would eat his lunch, were pleasantly surprised.
The lackluster Democratic response to the Great Recession, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Times’s Astead Herndon, “created so much damage economically, for people, but it also created a lot of political damage for the party.”
Obama’s failure to go big and to send the tumbrels rolling down Wall Street certainly greased the runway for Donald Trump. The paradox of Obama is that Americans embraced radical change by electing him but then he held himself in check, mistakenly believing that he was all the change they could handle.
As vice president, Biden worried that the Obama and Valerie Jarrett crowd at the cool table were too cerebral sometimes, that they’d rather be right than win.
Once Obama had spoken, he expected others to come along. If the policies were good, they’d sell themselves. The president, as it turned out, hated politicking. The idea that he had to sell his agenda was so anathema to him that — shockingly — he had to get Bill Clinton to do it for him at the 2012 Democratic convention. Obama joked that his predecessor would be the new “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.”
Obama seems more comfortable as Netflix talent, sitting pretty with celebrities and chit-chatting with Bruce Springsteen in their new Spotify podcast, “Renegades: Born in the USA.”
Biden, by contrast, is a natural-born salesman, the son of a salesman, who loves nothing more than to mingle with the masses.
Democrats think it’s really kind of cool. Imagine that.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2021 4:11 pm
by Luke
Dana Carvey's impression of Biden on Colbert
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Wednesday that he's barely spoken to President Biden since the Jan. 20 inauguration, accusing the White House of shifting to the "hard left."
"I don't believe I've spoken with him since he was sworn in," McConnell said during an interview with Fox News, adding that he hadn't been invited to the White House either.
Spokespeople for McConnell didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, but clarified to CNN that while they had spoken since the Jan. 20 inauguration, they haven't talked about the agenda.
McConnell previously told reporters on Feb. 2 that he and Biden had spoken about Myanmar and the budget process and coronavirus relief. Democrats used a special process known as budget reconciliation to pass their sweeping $1.9 trillion bill over GOP objections. The filibuster cannot be used to slow measures moved under the budgetary rules.
Re: #46 President Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. & Vice President Kamala Devi Harris
Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2021 4:47 pm
by Luke
Gee, after #MoscowMitch encouraged the insurrection by not acknowledging Biden's win for MONTHS, and delighting at any opportunity to obstruct with crocodile tears after disregarding all rules when his party was in power, can't imagine why Biden isn't having him over for milk and cookies. Fu*k you, MoscowMitch.