Do you think Joe Biden is a good President? Why or why not?

[diller]

On this side of the pond the most we hear about him of late are his various announcements regarding Ukraine, and also his gaffes, most recently asking where a dead colleague was, forgetting how many states America has, repeating the incorrect claim that his son died in Iraq, and getting the name of our prime minister wrong (although to be fair we've had quite a few recently). Do his age and apparent forgetfulness play into general opinion of him over there?

I think that says more about where you get your news from.

No newspaper or television journalists linger on that stuff where I live, even the right wings newspapers don't really bring it up.

I assume you are British since you have those trash tabloids that post stupid stuff.

[Biglog]

The main legitimate complaint about Biden is inflation, but the primary cause of that has been higher labor costs. Wages in the US over the pandemic went from about $9/hour to $15/hour for most minimum-wage type jobs. Employers can't find people willing to work for $9/hour anymore. That started under Trump during the pandemic, not Biden, but historically voters blame the sitting party regardless. That's why the recent midterms should have been an easy win for the GOP, but they dropped the ball trying to go too far extreme right and it cost them votes.

That end of the pay scale was behind cost-of-living increases for 15 years, and they caught up all at once due to the pandemic. And higher wages are a good thing to some degree, but those higher wages are passed along in higher prices to consumers as we've all seen. There's no simple fix for that for any President, people aren't going to suddenly accept working those jobs for $9/hr again. So inflation relief is going to have to come indirectly from other economic actions, and that's unfortunately going to be not be quick.

This is what voters in the US are thinking about, not a clip of a stumble on a stair that gets pushed on social media. Especially when the previous President is basically the same age and had far more significant gaffes like spelling basic words, along with the same stair stumbles. Biden rides a bike for exercise all the time, while the previous President wouldn't make it 10 feet on a bike. So that propaganda social media stuff may have got more play outside the US.

[Endus]

The main legitimate complaint about Biden is inflation, but the primary cause of that has been higher labor costs.

Inflation has been a global phenomenon and most of the effect has been driven by corporate profiteering. Labor cost increases are comparatively negligible.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...s-robert-reich

It's no accident that alongside inflation, major companies are largely posting record profits as well. Direct causative relationship.

[Captain N]

It's no accident that alongside inflation, major companies are largely posting record profits as well. Direct causative relationship.

Which negates the "higher wages = more expensive products" talking point. We know that those profits aren't being used for wages -- they're being spent on stock buybacks and administrative salaries/bonuses.

[Endus]

Which negates the "higher wages = more expensive products" talking point. We know that those profits aren't being used for wages -- they're being spent on stock buybacks and administrative salaries/bonuses.

Like, just go ahead and evaluate how much a labor increase actually means in terms of dollar value, particularly at minimum wage levels. Remember the study a few years back about the impact of a $15 minimum wage on McDonalds prices?

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/rele...3-percent.html

Yeah, a Big Mac's price would have risen by 4.3%, or about $0.17 at the time it was written. That was with the low-end wages nearly doubling. The idea that wages are the cause is literally anti-worker propaganda pushed by big business, to try and keep wages suppressed and their operating costs low, while they continue jamming as many dollar bills in their own pockets as they can get away with.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I don't think he's great. I don't think he's a problem. He's kinda what we needed after the last shitshow. A President that just does the normal stuff.

[DarkAmbient]

I think that says more about where you get your news from.

No newspaper or television journalists linger on that stuff where I live, even the right wings newspapers don't really bring it up.

I assume you are British since you have those trash tabloids that post stupid stuff.

I said where I get my news from on the same page as the post you just quoted. As for Biden's gaffes they are reported everywhere, including that well known Trump supporting outfit Reuters: U.S. President Biden slips up on name of ASEAN summit host Cambodia

I'd love to know which part of the world is free of trashy tabloids, maybe you could enlighten us.

[diller]

I said where I get my news from on the same page as the post you just quoted. As for Biden's gaffes they are reported everywhere, including that well known Trump supporting outfit Reuters: U.S. President Biden slips up on name of ASEAN summit host Cambodia

I'd love to know which part of the world is free of trashy tabloids, maybe you could enlighten us.

Yes I saw afterwards that you mentioned the media, but I doubt anyone reads the entire thread before replying to a post.

I live in Denmark.

[DingDongKing]

I don't think he's great. I don't think he's a problem. He's kinda what we needed after the last shitshow. A President that just does the normal stuff.

Pretty much this for me. Gets on with it. I’d lay more blame at the party door in general re their shocking lack of decisive action in the first 2 years.

[Flurryfang]

I think he is pretty alright, mostly because he is harmless. He is a president, who is very inactive, speaks what the party wants him to say and goes around waving at people....That is so much better than what we saw with Trump, so i take it as a good break after the lunacy we had in that period.


Ofcourse i would always prefer someone active, controlled, calm and engaged like Obama, but if i can't get that, i will take a Biden approach anyday

[Grinning Serpent]

His policy moves have generally been better than anticipated, and he's brought an air of stability after four years of a fucking lunatic blathering on incessantly about petty grievances. Pulling out of Afghanistan in particular was sloppy but long overdue. He gets flack for a lot of shit that's out of the President's control but that's nothing new in politics.

He's still a lib with a dogshit political legacy, too old, and probably mildly demented. But better than Trump or one of his acolytes by a country mile.

The real problem is that there aren't really any better candidates. Obviously Sanders is great but he's too far to the left to get the nomination, and there aren't really any genuine progressives on the left who are old and experienced enough to fill his shoes.

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I don't understand how a person could be a Sanders supporter and then say Romney and Obama were "good candidates," unless you just mean that they were relatively young, charismatic, and well-spoken. Sanders couldn't be much further from them on policy.

I genuinely don't understand people wanting to slob on Sanders' knob.

He's a useless sack of dog turds. Yeah, sure, he's more left-leaning than pretty much any other establishment politician (and he's been in Congress for long enough that he *is* "establishment"), but he has absolutely no accomplishments or victories of note and his background is pretty weak.

He's an ineffective senator, he'd be an even less effective President. Are we that fucking desperate for *anyone* left of fence-fucking centrists that we're clinging to Sanders as though he's the chosen one? Because as far as I'm concerned, he's a pretty fucking shit candidate.

He did *okay* when it was literally just him and HRC for the entire election cycle (no, it wasn't "stolen" or "rigged," even the man himself literally said on live TV that he lost fair and square), but we saw just how weak he actually is in 2020, when it was a crowded field and he had to compete for votes among several candidates.

Moreover, he's fucking *old.* Yeah, he seems to be more hale and hearty than Biden and a lot of the other undead that populate Congress lately, but when you're at that age, health changes are like falling off a cliff. Lord knows I've seen plenty of 75+ people go from healthy and active to being embalmed in a funeral home inside of a week. Hell, my own grandma was doing well right up until she took ill with a common cold and not even a month later, complications from that illness killed her.

I would much rather we devote our fanboyism to *young*, left-leaning candidates.

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I sometimes wonder whether or not trying to get the Democrats and Republicans to establish a joint leadership of some kind in the White House might be the best solution to healing America's divides. I read that after WW2, America was trying to get the two major Chinese parties, the left-wing CCP and the right-wing KMT (the former supported by the Soviets and the latter by the Americans), to do the same in order to avoid conflict, but despite months of efforts, it didn't seem to work out, and their civil war broke out anew, leading to the situation we see today.

Anyway, as for Biden, I think he might arguably have (mostly) "good intentions", but he just sometimes seems too mundane and uninspiring for lots of Americans who want someone groundbreaking and spectacular, something truly different from what they see as the "establishment". That was Hillary's main weakness, she was seen as part of a political dynasty who spend decades slowly gathering power and influence at the highest levels of America's government, and thus she was less relatable to the ordinary working-class people. I think at least, there were better Democratic candidates than Biden, for example, Elizabeth Warren seemed quite promising for a while; even if not as President, she might have made an interesting Vice President.

Harris will always be, in my book, a fucking awful choice for VP. I guess they were banking on the combination of being Black and female netting them free votes?

But I don't know, man. After a long year of obscene police violence and excess, the last person I wanted in the White House was a fucking DA. Goddamn DAs being in bed with the cop unions is a huge part of why it's so hard to get police reform off the ground in the first place. DAs refuse to prosecute all but the most egregious (and public) of police offenses.

I'm not sure who I'd have tapped for his VP. I'd have to go back and review the information at the time. Warren might have worked - something of an olive branch to the more left-leaning voters and you still get the "female credit." But she's not much younger than Biden, I don't want the presidency bouncing around like a pinball if old age strikes the sitting President (Biden, Warren, and then Pelosi? Better get a few scrolls of Animate Dead handy...)

I think Hilldawg would've been a good President. Obama Part 2, basically. But it's undeniable that she ran a truly fucking *awful* campaign - she just *assumed* she'd win (remember, even Trump was visibly surprised when he was informed that he won) and that kind of attitude together with the American public's increasing resentment of "establishment" politicians... I don't know. The people running her campaign were fucking morons, especially when they failed to deflect all those "awkward Hillary" hit-pieces that kept coming out. The woman's never been a fantastic public speaker, but she's always been good at policy - maybe they should have focused on selling her generally strong policy goals and plans, particularly those for WV and other economically unstable regions, to counter the "awkward lizard person" image the memes gave her.

I'm wondering what Biden's planning for 2024. I think we're going to see the same issues we saw with HRC's campaign - idiot DNC believing that they win by default and a candidate that just doesn't seem to understand the distaste for "establishment" candidates when we don't have a metaphorical gun pointed at our head. He won (barely) on the "hey I'm not Trump" campaign in 2020, but he won't have that going for him in 2024. Honestly, it might even be best if he stepped down. Wouldn't that be the first time in our history that a sitting President abdicated?

[enigma77]

policy wise? yes
is he a good orator? no
is he an inspirational leader? no
is he borderline senile? yes

if Trump was a -10/10 biden is a 4/10

[Grinning Serpent]

Biden's had some good speeches. His speech on grief is particularly good. But I think he's past that point in life. I do believe he's legitimately starting to go senile. It's not *bad* yet, but he definitely seems dulled compared to what he was in 2008 and 2012.

[OwenBurton]

policy wise? yes
is he a good orator? no
is he an inspirational leader? no
is he borderline senile? yes

if Trump was a -10/10 biden is a 4/10

I think ideally, both the Democrats and Republicans need a new candidate for 2024, according to the polls, neither of them are too popular right now, and honestly, I never had much enthusiasm for either of them.

And preferably someone younger for both parties, Biden is turning 80 tomorrow, that makes him the oldest President ever in office.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...2024-election/

[Fugus]

I think ideally, both the Democrats and Republicans need a new candidate for 2024, according to the polls, neither of them are too popular right now, and honestly, I never had much enthuasism for either of them.

And preferably someone younger for both parties, Biden is turning 80 tomorrow, that makes him the oldest President ever in office.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...2024-election/

The biggest issue with that is the candidates they get.

When you get at the younger end the Republicans are down to lots of Trumpers who would run while the Democrats would get more AOC types that they literally changed their rules to keep out after she won.

The GOP candidates want to burn it all down for power while the DNC candidates actually want to fix stuff and neither of them are satisfied with status quo when you get down there. And neither leadership wants them.

[Logwyn]

I think ideally, both the Democrats and Republicans need a new candidate for 2024, according to the polls, neither of them are too popular right now, and honestly, I never had much enthusiasm for either of them.

And preferably someone younger for both parties, Biden is turning 80 tomorrow, that makes him the oldest President ever in office.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...2024-election/

There is always that idea floating around that Biden will resign at a time when Kamila can take over. Then She can finish out two years of Biden and then run for 8 of her own.

[enigma77]

There is always that idea floating around that Biden will resign at a time when Kamila can take over. Then She can finish out two years of Biden and then run for 8 of her own.

Nobody wants that woman to be president though.

[Darkeon]

So surprised at the poll results. Really out of brand for MMOC types. lol

On-topic: No, just no. Bring Trump back.

[s_bushido]

So surprised at the poll results. Really out of brand for MMOC types. lol

It's almost like left-leaning people aren't the communist cult that Republican propagandists like to pretend we are, and can actually criticize someone on our "side."

On-topic: No, just no. Bring Trump back.

Without the complete shitshow that was the Trump administration, Biden wouldn't even be president in the first place. Sucks to suck, I guess.

[Darkeon]

Sucks to suck, I guess.

Based.

But the entire post has big "Let them eat cake" vibes lol