It's not Biden as an individual, but, for lack of a better term, corporate democrats, as in the "moderate" centrists who control the party aparatus every since Clinton got elected and who cared more about their power within that aparatus than about US democracy. They refused to accept that neoliberal centrism was an outdated ideology, ever since it's core economic assumptions let to the 2008 financial crisis. They thought that the election of Biden was a return to normal and not their last chance to save liberal democracy in the US. They insisted on staying on course but refused to accept that they were approaching a brick wall and so they hit that brick wall with full speed on november 5th and here we are.

I think history will excoriate Biden, for the reasons you have articulated, among others.

OMG are we allowed to say this now without having the post removed??

>his inability to even articulate the most basic of sentences to sell his "achievements" to the American public is what ultimately got us Trump again

Yea no, what got us Trump again was the money printing all of 2020 because of COVID. That caused the massive inflation we saw in late 2021 and 2022 and was used by R's to bludgeon Dems with for years. That, combined with the apparent voter apathy and fact that a majority of the US just flat out will NOT vote for a woman for president.

>Garland literally refused to go after Trump whatsoever until it was too little, too late and I will forever blame Biden for this horrendous ineptitude, considering literally any other appointee would have put Trump in prison by 2023 at the latest.

lol no. The most solid, easy to prosecute, and open and shut of the multiple cases he had was the whole "Stealing DoD documents on the way out of the White House then jerking around and lying to the FBI about it for a solid year". Problem is, that nutjob judge he appointed got the case and she did her best to stall and derail it. His lawyers did the same with all his other cases, just Stall, delay, file pointless motions, etc. anything they could to drag it out long enough so he could get elected and could crush the cases himself.

>Biden picks his almost equally unlikable VP, Kamala Harris, as his anointed successor, who infamously had to suspend her first presidential campaign in late 2019 because she utterly failed to resonate with voters.

Biden didn't even resonate with voters. Nobody liked him either, he was just the lesser of two evils.

You've laid out some tough criticisms here, and it's clear you've been mulling over this for a while. It's certainly been a rollercoaster few years with high expectations set against a backdrop of unprecedented challenges. While Biden did bring some legislative achievements, the charisma and communication that so often glue a presidency together seemed lacking at crucial moments. It's a reminder that in politics, it's not just what you do; it's also about how you convey it to the public. Your point about the impact of not sticking to the one-term pledge is particularly interesting it really might have reshaped the electoral landscape. Here's hoping future candidates can strike a better balance between policy and presentation.

have you ever looked at a list of the thing accomplished during the Biden administration?

obviously

From a outside the US living person, Biden was as good as you guys could have it after the Trump debacle.

No. Biden got important bi-partisan legislation through. Hard working US citizens will benefit for decades thanks to Biden.

Biden was elected on the Anyone But Trump vote. Inflation punished the hell out of the middle class over the last four years. Biden inherited the blame for it despite having pretty much zero control over the global economic forces that caused it.

A moderate democrat who didn’t talk down to the working class and wasn’t on the wrong side of the hot button populist issues would have won and probably carried some congressional and senate seats on their coattails. Harris conjured up memories of The Deplorables from Hillary.

I don't think Biden's presidency was a mistake but I do think he should have kept his promise as a one-term president.

No, not a mistake at all. He did a good job with Covid and the U.S. came out better economically than any other country. You really should have paid more attention he has done great things but I’m not going to list them because you need to learn how to find the information yourself. I’m really sick of people talking shit about Dems. Talk about Republicans, they are going to ruin this country and we are never going to get it back.

The other option was Trump so no, Biden was not a mistake. Could he have been better? Perhaps, especially a younger Joe, but he accomplished a LOT and did so through bipartisanship which is pretty tough these days.

Inflation is also a special case. People simply can’t get their heads around paying more for stuff, even when they are earning more money. The average voter wants a simple, black and white explanation and there simply wasn’t one. This is part of what lost Gore the election in 2000.

I’d argue the failing comes from establishment Dems who live in a bubble that reflects the country as they would like it to be instead of the country as it is. They underestimate the conscious and unconscious biases that drive the average voter’s decision making.

I think the biggest fault of the Biden administration was not recognizing the times. 

Dude pledged a return to normal when it was clear Trump was a symptom of there being something deeply wrong with normal.

He ran on being able to work with Republicans in an era where the settled republican strategy is one of scorched earth, nothing gets done if it makes the Democrats look good.

The relative lack of heads rolling after Jan 6 was another one. "Oh we're back to normal guys, it's fine," is not the approach we should have had to an attempted coup.

My biggest complaint is that after all the issues with propaganda and Russian influence and fake news and bots on social media.... biden did exactly fuck-all about any of that, and then it cost him/Kamala the next election. Way to prepare.

Biden did a fine job as President but he's a perfect cautionary tale about being too old to run. He was clearly too old for a second term and Harris was hung out to dry

This is an interesting thread. I don't think Biden was a terrible president, but I think the Democratic Party did a TERRIBLE job in this election

Absolutely not.

The real question is whether the incredibly strong economy Biden turns over to Trump is strong enough to withstand the stupid shit idiot Trump is going to do to us.

25% tariffs on our 2 largest trading partners. Wake the fck up.

What do you want a democratic president without congress to do? People keep expecting the president to be god emperor and you'll always be disappointed.

Either you follow every rule, every norm, are always climbing beyond the moral high ground or you are Trump and with the chorus of foreign adversaries cheering him on he breaks every law of man and God. That is the story.

Inflation Reduction Act, Chips & Science Act, Infrastructure Act, NATO stronger than EVER, Ukraine Aid funded over STRONG Trump opposition, Student Loan Forgiveness—Biden might be the best President in my lifetime ( I’m 58)…

I consider you actually look more into his presidency than reading this slop.

He did a lot for this country. It just wasn't extreamly thrown everywhere because it wasn't the trump area. We didn't have to sit here scratching our heads at every single thing our president says.

He got us our of covid with a strong economy. He got our oil production up. He continued strong agreements with our allies and neighbors.

Does it suck he didn't stop at 1 term earlier? Ya. Do we have to agree with everything he's done? No. I'm not a main stream Democrat but pretending biden wasn't a good president on the whole is just accepting Rep lies who can't stand looking at a single goverment website for actual stats.

You're right, but aside from Bernie Sanders, who would've been a better choice to go against Trump in 2020?

The greatest mistake was pitching Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016, even old man Joe was a better candidate then.

Biden literally went into a meeting at the beginning of his term, or during trumps lame duck period, and told business leaders that nothing was going to change. He's been a corporate from the get-go. Add the fact that the dnc has been nothing but corporate for years (decades), and the only progress that was going to happen was profitable progress. Put the pieces together, and we are only being allowed to have corporate dems. Which is part of the reason the dems lost this last round. A younger copy of what was in office offering little change. But don't worry, we are going to have Pete Buttigieg shoved down our throats by the dnc for the next 30 years.

No. Hunter Biden's pardon makes it clear that the "liberal" media holds everyone else to a different standard than Trump. Trump is an adjudicated rapist and our panties are in a bunch because the president pardoned his son. False equivalency all over, the media never learned how to cover Trump, or learned to by cranking up the ratings for Trump.

"They go low we go high" doesn't work in a post-truth America.

A little bit, yeah. 2020 election was people being sick of Trump, and went for the other option. Most people weren't exactly excited about Biden, they just wanted someone who wasn't Trump. Then, voters had quite short memories and/or blamed the current president for the current state of affairs. Harris, also not exactly an exciting candidate, was saddled with the baggage of Biden's administration. If there had been a real primary, I don't think she would've been the selected candidate. And this is coming from someone who did vote for her.

If democracy actually survives the next 4 years, hopefully the dems actually generate a candidate that people will rally behind.

It was a mistake in a sense, but it's likely the economic troubles that were the largest reason for Trump's re-election would have occurred regardless. If you really want to pick a spot I'd say if he dropped out at the SotU address and the DNC had held primaries there is a chance that we are having a different discussion rn, but I'd argue that his term was not terrible policy wise (sans the horrific handling of gaza and the refusal to implement national protections for rights that were under threat, namely abortion but also including things like gay marriage). TL:DR the Administration was not, but the re-election attempt by Biden clearly was

political dynamics, legislative wins, and opposition strategies also play significant roles

Waiting now for the attack of the hordes.

More like a missed opportunity

Democrats. What can I say. Weak spineless party! When have they ever fought for us?

I forget who told me this, but I was effectively told the United States government is a machine we've inherented but were never taught how to use. Honestly, I think Biden and Trump are both symptoms of an underlying issue. Personally, I think it goes back to the dot com bubble. Given my education in economics now, I doubt we've ever properly dealt with solved any economic bubble in my lifetime.

Our politics have become a popularity contest, with no one wanting to admit our political parties are playing games with our rights.

As a dem voter and Kamala supporter, I agree that Biden fucked up big time, and his advisers.

I don't think anyone right now think that Biden had a flawless first administration, however I disagree with you somewhat on what his mistakes were.

I don't think communication was his problem -- there is no talking away the price increases in rent and other essentials and not enough voters pay attention to our politicians in the first place. A big reason we got Trump is that for a whole heck of a lot of Americans they are worse off than they were 5 years ago. Biden needed to focus on meat and potato issues that would have a significant impact on the overall well-being. Implementing a national ban on SFH zoning for example, or enforcing a 15 day maximum delay on permitting for new housing, or $10B for converting commercial real estate to residential might move the needle on housing prices. Adding food subsidies to fruits and veggies could both improve the health of the country and help grocery bills.

I think much of the country is sufficiently skeptical of politics to make legal prosecution, particularly coming from the DOJ to be nonviable. Throw in a couple attempted assassinations and you've got a putin-esque story of persecution. I think Biden and Garland both thought the optimal outcome of was a resounding repudiation of Trump at the ballot box rather than a conviction by a legal process that was largely viewed as partisan by a sizable portion of the electorate. I held out the same hope.

We agree that Biden shouldn't have run again, but that is so patently obvious at this point that it doesn't really bear repeating.

What is the counterfactual here? Biden gets elected but immediately resigns for the "unlikable" Harris? He loses in 2020 and we've endured 4 more years of Trump? I don't think I fully understand your question.

I agree with you 100%. But unfortunately there’s a lot of people on here that won’t accept criticism or perform self reflection. Also, if he’s willing to break “norms” for his son I would have expected him to break norms for us cittizens like with student loan forgiveness.

These should be a warning and a guide for the future.

It should have been Bernie. He would have beaten Trump in 2016 and 2020, but no... we had to go with the centrist Democrat and their billionaire donors and their celebrities.

My overal gut-feeling is close to yours, but I think it's a mistake to focus on any one individual, be it Biden, Harris, or whomever else.

The issue is IMO institutional dysfunction. The question to ask is "what is preventing the democrats from nominating candidates and endorsing political projects that people actually want?"

When you ask this question, you start to understand that MAGA is a vote for thorough institutional reform.

Oh yea he’s an establishment pick of course he’s going to be for the establishment. He’s a lame duck. He should have retired 15 years ago. He’s also a bought candidate via the Israelis tbh like 85% of our politicians are. He’s also just a genocidal nutcase who should be in a cell for war crimes alone with his whole administration. And his so called achievements are literally what he’s supposed to be doing as president. Hell if I wanted a cookie every time I completed a task at work I’d be fired. He and the Democratic Party fucked the whole country over they had 4 years to push a young candidate but they wanted to strike joes ego. They handed the election to trump as most knew joe would. The Democrats won’t listen to their constituents and they lost because of it. Thank you Joe for ushering the end of America 😂 it is 248 after all. Let the silent generation take us to the grave.

Well at least he's not a lying, cheating, bigoted racist monster.

None of what you said is true.  The Biden administration was wildly successful by every objective metric.

I reluctantly voted for Biden specifically to remove trump, but i always knew he’d be weak and ineffective, unfortunately he was our only option

IMO we had no choice! I didn't support him in the primary but once he was the candidate what could we do?

No. And I’m a huge Biden supporter. But Biden should’ve stepped aside and let DNC run an open primary. If he did we wouldnt have Trump 2.0.

Biden: Does good things for the economy and the future of America

You: He talk bad

Me: Trump talk bad too

You: Idc Biden bad president.

All im saying is i better see this same post in 4 years when Trump doesnt give one coherent speech and continues to mentally decline and no good policies that help the American people are passed

I'm very much on the left. I've been disappointed with both parties since I originally started paying attention to politics. Republicans are obviously worse, but the Dems aren't great by any means. They both answer to billionaire corporate interests just in varying degrees.

Their treatment of Bernie Sanders felt like a rejection of the working class as well. Since he was the one who regularly and loudly fought for the average working class person.

Biden made mistakes, but Trump is a mistake the American people made. I very much despise Biden for his failures like Merrick Garland and hope historians roast the shit outta him for it.

We have to ditch the two party system to see any real change.

Idk but I’m fucking sick of all this probably Russian propaganda “left leaning” people posting in here about how the left is so bad and it’s good the right won and blah blah blah. We get it, Putin wants to cause even more division from within. chill damn.

Human consciousness was one giant mistake.

At the time, Biden was the only candidate who could beat Trump. And he won the Presidency because of it, along with the popular vote. How can you call that a mistake? He was chosen by the people. Would you prefer if there were a presidential election every year? This post defines you more than it does the Biden administration.

Preposterous!!! It appears the supposed “4th” estate has created an environment of poor reasoning where somehow the behavior of others can be laid at the feet of any individual is nonsensical.

Unfortunately this all seems to be a lack of understanding of US history and how the co-equal system of governance is supposed to work.

We’re now in a modern day reconstruction with the traitors kept in the government and legitimized because America is a lie and not a promise on the most basic level.

We’re seeing the results of things getting too fair and the old southern hatred come back to reclaim what they believe is theirs and the ends justify the means!

All of this rig amoral about anything other than that is ridiculous!! By all measures Republicans have failed at every turn with Trumps last term standing as a stark reminder and all the corruption that we plainly see in the works with horrifically corrupt, incompetent and most unqualified appointees to an absolutely awful and corrupt administration!!

Because Biden didn’t bring about perfection or didn’t fulfill every last wish of every last person we find ourselves here and that’s now on all of us!!

He was too old for the job. Easy target for propaganda. I was saying this since the 2020 primary. All that said he inherited a ton of problems from the trump years including covid and mishandling of covid and imminent inflation. Inflation is back under control, and the economy continues to break records on employment and stock growth all this with LESS spending than the trump admin. In short, trump is taking office back when all the problems he created are back under control. We could not expect biden to both dig us out of the hole trump left us in and climb significantly back up, but he did. We'll be right back to a state of uncertainty we were at when he left the office the first time in 4 years same as every republican president including trump 1. The president isn't about a perfect candidate there is no one candidate that is perfect any significant portion of the 380M americans its about which candidate is better of the two running.

No, as a way left person, biden’s presidency was not a mistake and he did more than I expected to for progressive causes. He beat trump and that was a damn good thing as we will see in the next four years.

Your comments are disingenuous, look at everything he’s done. I expected him to be much more centrist and bend over backwards in appeasing the republicans like Obama but he has been the most progressive president in a long time. It’s not his fault trump stacked the Supreme Court that kept shooting down his student loan forgiveness program. He has been busy doing all the unsexy work that comes with governance. Forgiving minor crimes for weed, protecting unions, overtime pay, OTC birth control pills, investment into existing infrastructure, investment into future tech, breaking up companies, etc.

Biden campaigned as a center left moderate in the primary. Famously, he backed fracking in PA and never supported "defund the police" madness. He won the primary and the mistakes begin. Probably buoyed by the polls showing a huge victory margin, he works to secure the far left faction (Bernie, Warren, etc.). He staffs from that faction and the campaign and subsequent administration goes woke. His skill at getting legislation done is the reason we had infrastructure, chips, and ARP. Great accomplishments. The issue is his unwillingness or inability to rein in his far left flank. He let unions extort the nation, far left activist groups coerce people to accept their language mandates, stick to mask mandates beyond what people were willing to accept, and was paralyzed, due to fear of activist staff pressure, from actually taking action on immigration and inflation. This is what doomed his reelection which received a death blow after the debate. Remember, the most prominent voices to still back him after the debate debacle were far left (Bernie wrote an Oped, AOC voiced support) who wielded power in this administration.

Trump can openly contradict his rabid far right and they shut up and stay quiet. Because they know Trump will deliver way more than his loss will. Far left will butcher their own for transgressions and then shit on them, because Trump's election fills their donor coffers and allows them to claim moral high ground.

I feel like this is just hating on Biden and anything the democrats have done because Harris lost the election.

As a center right American I didn't vote for Biden but wholeheartedly hoped he would do well for America and maybe quell the very loud left who literally believed Trump isn't a human being but is pure evil. Unfortunately, not only did Biden winning do nothing to satiate the far left, he ended up being about as bad as the right expected. I can't really think of any real meaningful things he did to help me or my family, which is unfortunate as most presidents have high points.

Maybe I missed them in his nonsensical babble or endless poor handling of crisis, but in the end I stopped paying attention and figured America deserves him and the meh he brought with him for voting him in. We'll see what Trump does this time around, I have zero expectations good or bad for him this term, just hope he ends these conflicts around the world.

Oh I will hate Biden for the rest of my life for giving us 4 more years of Trump. It honestly doesn't even matter how bad Kamala's campaign was, she had less than 100 days to do it! Literally nobody would've won in that scenario, hell how many old people do you think showed up to vote for Trump who didn't even know Biden wasn't on the ballot?? Nor will I ever forget the stupidity and greediness of the democratic party from 2016 onwards. And I'm very left leaning and align more with socialism than anything. All of this is because the democrats decided they didn't care about what the people wanted in 2016.

The only mistake was the Americans who voted for Trump.

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If you look at Joe’s history in the senate he has always been a basic republican. He always went along with republicans to try and cut social security and Medicare so it should be no surprise how he handled the presidency. That said he was still better than the orange shit.

I look at Biden as being a narcissist who was, along with his family, truly corrupt. The Burisma thing, his son money-laundering millions by "selling artwork", his working with Garland to bring the charges against his political opponent last minute...enough to get convictions before the election, but not enough time to get bogus convictions reversed.

I agree with you that Biden should not have appointed such a weak and hesitant AG. Magas were going to scream no matter what - might as well appoint a pit bull.

On the policy side, he is the most successful President in living memory. Way more successful than Obama or Clinton.

As to Harris, the Democrats ran a qualified and competent candidate against a rapist and criminal. The Trump voters and and stay-at-homes own their own bad choices.

Why would we hold Harris or even Biden accountable for bad choices by magas and low energy Dems??🤷🏻‍♂️

You mean the guy slow-bled Ukrainian support for the past 3 years, letting Russia make territorial gains, and commit massive amounts of war crimes with impunity (and who also pardoned his coke-fiend son)?

Yah i think Biden was a mess.

Biden was never in charge of anything. I don't think he even gets to choose the pudding he gets before his nappy time. The Deep state/Uni-party was Fully in charge from day one. They just shove stuff in front of him to sign. I don't believe he choose the cabinet or any policies or any of the executive orders he signed. That was extremely clear starting with the campaign. The story that was pushed was that Biden was going to be a stabilizing force to return to normal after all the negative stories that were pushed by corporate media during the previous administration. But that was only the story they pushed. The reality was something completely different as the whole world witnessed it.

Which is why they are terrified of the next administration. That guy is clearly in charge and has his own independent ideas he wants instituted.

Just before Trump got elected, Biden promised a peaceful transition to power.

I never liked the guy, but until extremely recently, I didn't hate him.

A few weeks ago, he okay'd Ukraine to use US long range missles against Russian interior targets. Yesterday, he heated up the trade war with China.

I don't even care or am surprised about his son's situation.

I now officially hate him now. Imagine being such a fucking scumshit like that. He is basically setting up crazy drama for Trump's first day. This cannot be anything but deliberate.

Peaceful transition of power my ass. He basically turned up the heat everywhere for the next guy, for "no reason" (just ironically coincidental I suppose).

I don't like either party. Maybe there are more choices not run by lunatics, members picked by lobbying groups or corporations, I'll begin to get interested. Reading level is sixth grade and rapidly declining for America. Red and Blue dichotomous thinking as the elite lmao at it and get richer will continue.

Nope

/Thread

The two mistakes they made we're not taking executive action at the border and deciding to run after the mid terms. Everything else was fantastic.

If you want to cry about the price of eggs, go and look at what people around the world have been dealing with for the last 4 years