Mostly accurate but a little too harsh. Biden was dealt a tough hand. It could certainly have been played better, hence the accuracy, but it was legitimately difficult and he had some real accomplishments along with his mistakes, not least the fact that the U.S. economy has performed the best in the world during his time in office.
Carter's era was defined by stagflation: both high inflation and high employment.
To the extent that Biden's policies contributed to inflation (and in fairness, they did), they also successfully kept unemployment low, which was the goal. And at the same time, the fact that inflation rose everywhere makes it clear that the main drivers of inflation were outside of Biden's control.
Biden can accurately be blamed for not pivoting earlier to control inflation and even more so for not communicating more effectively about the fact that he inherited a disastrous economy and that the inflation we experienced were the growing pains of emerging from that disaster.
A better communicator, which is part of the job of being President, would have gotten more credit for the fact that American economy has done far better over the last four years than the rest of the world. But the fact that he was so ineffective as a communicator doesn't negate that record.
I don't see any evidence that Biden's policies played a role in reducing unemployment, which had spiked with Covid but were already on its way down before Biden took office. It had gone as high as 15 percent, but was back to around 7 when Trump left and would continue to decline. Inflation was not the result of "growing pains" but of Biden's excessive spending in the American Rescue Plan, which he'd been warned against by Democratic economists Larry Summers and Jason Furman. America's economy is generally better than the rest of the world, and Biden wasn't an exception, but neither was he the cause.
Meanwhile, disaster in Afghanistan, gas prices going from $2.17 a gallon in 2020 to $4.90 a gallon by 2022 and a President who didn't seem up to the job... all we were missing in the end was the cardigan.
There was no guarantee that unemployment was going to continue to decline. Not only is an external shock like the one COVID dealt to the economy more than enough to push an economy into recession, but in 2021 we were actually at the high point of COVID deaths because of the Delta wave. There was a huge danger of the economy not rebounding to full employment, which was the reason for the aggressive stimulus plan. After the previous Republican recession in 2007, the Obama administration settled for an insufficient stimulus plan in 2009, which was the key reason economy didn't recover as fast as otherwise it might have.
Given that history, it wasn't the least bit unreasonable for the Biden administration to believe that there was less danger in too much stimulus than not enough. And given the fact that Europe, which stimulated less, experienced BOTH higher unemployment and higher inflation suggests it may have even been the right decision.
That said, it certainly did contribute to the high inflation. And the fact that Biden didn't message this as effectively as he could have (he should have been talking every day about the Trump depression he inherited) and was too slow to take other steps that could have addressed inflation or reduced some of its impact on the working class indeed led to his defeat.
It's hard to say precisely what the causation and correlation is though. The US did better than the EU. Was it because of US public policy? There were many variables at play, and I don't think it's safe to conclude that the outcome in the US was necessarily because of our public policy. US population growth, greater consumer spending, etc. are all factors as well. Fiscal policy played a role in both regions ("similar fiscal impulses" from 2020-2023), but somehow the US still comes out ahead, telling me that there's something else about the U.S. that makes a difference. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/economic-bulletin/focus/2024/html/ecb.ebbox202404_01~3ceb83e0e4.en.html
Agreed that there is far more to the economy than public policy, and it's hard/impossible to tease out how much each factor played. I don't pretend to have the answer.
My real point is that to the extent that you're going to blame Biden for what went wrong with the economy during his time in office (and I agree that his policies did have some effect), you should also credit him for what went right to a similar extent.
And that automatically means they were Democrats? In fact the first one was just a mixed up kid who was after the first famous person to come within range. And he had previously donated to Republican causes. Or did you miss that part of the explanation.
You have prominent Democrats actually calling for and fantasizing about a Trump assassination. At the very least, the nasty and divisive Democrat rhetoric is a clear catalyst to pushing crazy people to do the FBI bidding to rid themselves of the Trump threat to their Democrat-connected power and careers.
Trying to claim that the assassination attempts were not Democrat-connected is a stretch.
A classic case of projection. Which prominent Democrats? Easy to claim in the abstract, hard to prove in the real world.
And in any case, you are apparently defending a past and future president whose direct suggestions of the use of violence against his political opponents have been documented many times - including on January 6th.
And by the way, if you think there aren’t any Republicans out there who would be happy to be rid of Trump, you are sadly mistaken.
There are not any real Republicans that want to be rid of Trump as without Trump those Republicans would be out of power washed up like the losing relics of Romney and McCain.
Here is a point to make... you are bright enough and informed enough that I can call your position here disingenuous as you clearly are are one with TDS and supportive of the extreme hyperbolic Democrat political rhetoric fomenting irrational public fear and hate against Trump. The Democrats pushed the fake Trump-Russia collusion, the fake "J6 insurrection" (it was just a protest with civil disobedience) and the lie that Trump is a fascist and threat to democracy. So yes, "Democrat assassination attempts" is accurate.
The record of presidents who have been truly transformational is pretty short - IMO Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, TR, FDR, and some might include JFK, although I think it would have taken a second term to have cemented that, if at all. Most of the others have done as well as could be expected, some under difficult circumstances. To my mind only one, Andrew Johnson was a complete disaster and of course he wasn’t directly elected to the office.
So to call Biden a mediocre president is not really a condemnation. And, as has certainly happened with other presidents, that designation may change over time.
The real problem, as it seems to me, is us. It is perhaps trite to say that we get the presidents we deserve and yet there is a great deal of truth to that. American voters are both the inheritors and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human government ever attempted.
But how many of us really understand the nature of that experiment, and then act upon it. More often, we act like the waves of some great political sea, moving this way and that under whichever moon mood controls the gravity of the moment. And so at various times we’ve enabled policies that are directly contradictory to our founding design - slavery, the exclusion of women from the franchise, and the entire Jim Crow era to name just three. Indeed, we were founded on the greatest contradiction of all - slavery in a nation dedication to freedom and individual rights.
The job of president of the United States has become over time the single most challenging in human history, bar none. The capacity to hold together this vast and fractious nation and at the same time to keep it even close to the promise and potential of the original design is a task to which I’m not at all sure any single human being ever born is up to. But if a substantial number of the American people are dead set against that design, even if they do not grasp the enormity of their intent, then who is to blame but we ourselves.
So now we’ve managed for the first time in our history to elect to the Presidency for the second time a man who utterly disdains three of our founding principles - our electoral process, our Constitution, and the rule of law. This is not Joe Biden’s fault. Yes, he overstayed his usefulness, but he did not pull the levers for Donald Trump - half of us did. Half of us failed in the essential duty of the citizenry of a republic - to act to maintain that most fragile of governments whatever flaws we may perceive it to have.
So many are calling Trump a transformational president. But he is the result of a transformational moment, not its cause. Half of us are its direct cause and the other half may well have given it away.
"For all the ink that has been expended on political events of the last year, it is surely incontrovertible that Donald Trump is the single most consequential political figure since Ronald Reagan, and arguably Franklin Roosevelt."
Don't get me wrong. Trump has his place in history. And I say that as someone who does not like him. But it's one thing to assert that Trump is the "single most consequential political figure" since Reagan or Roosevelt, it's something else entirely to state that such an observation is "surely incontrovertible." Actually, it's highly controvertible. In fact, you had better have a pretty good argument on hand to back up a statement like that one. And I would give that argument as fair a reading as I am capable of. But this columnist doesn't even offer one.
Making this column even more comically myopic is its ludicrous absence of self-awareness. After his grand and utterly unsupported historical declarations, the columnist then goes on to smugly declare that Biden is the one who lacks "mitigation" in making his judgements. This is exactly what it sounds like when a pot meets a kettle and screams, "Look how black you are!"
Seemingly unaware of how badly he's undermining his own thesis, the columnist then goes on to admit that Biden's presidency included: "a slew of major legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. This act was of a kind about which other Western leaders could only dream ... The results were spectacular"
So I ask you: where is the list of "major legislation" with "spectacular" results from the Trump presidency? Very few, if any, examples come to mind. He signed a tax cut, but the results most definitely were not "spectacular." And the only other thing I can think of is Operation Warp Speed (and that's being generous).
Sorry, but if you're going to hold up one president (Trump) as the "most consequential political figure" in a century of American history, and a second president (Biden) as a "mediocrity," shouldn't it be the ostensibly "consequential" President who has the impressive record of accomplishments? Rather than the other way around? Seriously, how do articles like this get past editors?
But it gets better. Determined to persist to the very end of this column with as little self-reflection as humanly possible, its author asserts "Talent will out in the end, they say, but so too will mediocrity." Yes, yes indeed. After reading this column, I could not agree more. But Biden is not the one that I have in mind.
Mediocre? Let’s not mince our words. He was fucking awful. Just fucking awful. Senile, volatile, arrogant, not in control of policy or his faculties, the nation left in the hands of dramatically mediocre apparatchik radicals who made predictably stupid decisions across the board. Did anyone get a load of wave after wave of lunatics nominated for the Federal bench? High percentage of nominees who couldn’t answer basic questions of Federal law and procedure.
Biden's failure is that he did not confront inflation and neither did Harris. Confronting inflation means first of all communicating to voters that you understand their pain. Second, it means proposing concrete steps to improve the income of the average working family to meet the rising costs of food, housing and energy. Third, it means confronting the greed of the companies which are raising prices. Forth, it means noting that the most inflationary period was the post covid surge which was inevitable.
Costs went up during Covid. Harris/Biden should have stressed this point. The covid inflation was not due to his administration. I never once heard this on the campaign trail
You must be pretty young if that's the case. In fact, after Trump made a hash of things, he had things pretty much teed up for him, and he managed to mostly bollocks things up trying to be FDR when all the country really needed was clean up on aisles 5 (and 6)...
If there is one issue that summarizes Biden's presidency, it was his obsessive push for student debt forgiveness. The justification for student debt forgiveness, as opposed to any other type of debt forgiveness, was never made to the American people. Further, Biden never acknowledged the possibility that student debt forgiveness without a parallel plan to rein in higher education costs would be inflationary.
p.s. President Biden, of all people given his experience, never acted as if funding for student debt relief would have to come from Congress as is required by the US Constitution.
This kind of attack is exactly what’ is predictable at this point. There was a disastrous election result so of course you have to find someone to blame and Biden is an easy target right now. Kamala is next.
Although the timing might not have been best for taming the inflation that was already present when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, the economic argument I read was that " the IRA's actual inflationary impact was minimal, while its structural economic benefits appear more significant." https://climate.mit.edu/posts/economic-implications-climate-provisions-inflation-reduction-act... Actual investments are/will be spread over many years and so it would have had a very small immediate effect.
The American Rescue Plan (on top of the previous spending during the Trump years and the impact of COVID spending) was really what launched inflation. Inflation was already out of control, which is why they called a law that had nothing to do with fighting inflation the Inflation Reduction Act. Biden said that was one of the great regrets of his presidency.
I'm still trying to figure out who the actual president has been the last four years.
Mostly accurate but a little too harsh. Biden was dealt a tough hand. It could certainly have been played better, hence the accuracy, but it was legitimately difficult and he had some real accomplishments along with his mistakes, not least the fact that the U.S. economy has performed the best in the world during his time in office.
All people will recall us how workers lost purchasing power due to inflation. Carter 2.0.
Carter's era was defined by stagflation: both high inflation and high employment.
To the extent that Biden's policies contributed to inflation (and in fairness, they did), they also successfully kept unemployment low, which was the goal. And at the same time, the fact that inflation rose everywhere makes it clear that the main drivers of inflation were outside of Biden's control.
Biden can accurately be blamed for not pivoting earlier to control inflation and even more so for not communicating more effectively about the fact that he inherited a disastrous economy and that the inflation we experienced were the growing pains of emerging from that disaster.
A better communicator, which is part of the job of being President, would have gotten more credit for the fact that American economy has done far better over the last four years than the rest of the world. But the fact that he was so ineffective as a communicator doesn't negate that record.
I don't see any evidence that Biden's policies played a role in reducing unemployment, which had spiked with Covid but were already on its way down before Biden took office. It had gone as high as 15 percent, but was back to around 7 when Trump left and would continue to decline. Inflation was not the result of "growing pains" but of Biden's excessive spending in the American Rescue Plan, which he'd been warned against by Democratic economists Larry Summers and Jason Furman. America's economy is generally better than the rest of the world, and Biden wasn't an exception, but neither was he the cause.
Meanwhile, disaster in Afghanistan, gas prices going from $2.17 a gallon in 2020 to $4.90 a gallon by 2022 and a President who didn't seem up to the job... all we were missing in the end was the cardigan.
There was no guarantee that unemployment was going to continue to decline. Not only is an external shock like the one COVID dealt to the economy more than enough to push an economy into recession, but in 2021 we were actually at the high point of COVID deaths because of the Delta wave. There was a huge danger of the economy not rebounding to full employment, which was the reason for the aggressive stimulus plan. After the previous Republican recession in 2007, the Obama administration settled for an insufficient stimulus plan in 2009, which was the key reason economy didn't recover as fast as otherwise it might have.
Given that history, it wasn't the least bit unreasonable for the Biden administration to believe that there was less danger in too much stimulus than not enough. And given the fact that Europe, which stimulated less, experienced BOTH higher unemployment and higher inflation suggests it may have even been the right decision.
That said, it certainly did contribute to the high inflation. And the fact that Biden didn't message this as effectively as he could have (he should have been talking every day about the Trump depression he inherited) and was too slow to take other steps that could have addressed inflation or reduced some of its impact on the working class indeed led to his defeat.
But that doesn't change the fact that the American economy is the envy of the world (https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024-10-19), and he played a role in that.
It's hard to say precisely what the causation and correlation is though. The US did better than the EU. Was it because of US public policy? There were many variables at play, and I don't think it's safe to conclude that the outcome in the US was necessarily because of our public policy. US population growth, greater consumer spending, etc. are all factors as well. Fiscal policy played a role in both regions ("similar fiscal impulses" from 2020-2023), but somehow the US still comes out ahead, telling me that there's something else about the U.S. that makes a difference. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/economic-bulletin/focus/2024/html/ecb.ebbox202404_01~3ceb83e0e4.en.html
Agreed that there is far more to the economy than public policy, and it's hard/impossible to tease out how much each factor played. I don't pretend to have the answer.
My real point is that to the extent that you're going to blame Biden for what went wrong with the economy during his time in office (and I agree that his policies did have some effect), you should also credit him for what went right to a similar extent.
I have a sinking feeling that in four years we're all going to be a lot kinder to his legacy
Maybe, but recall why Trump is back in office. Biden will deserve some of the credit.
The Biden Scorecard:
- Hunter-Joe Quid Pro Quo
- Russiagate
- Hyper inflation
- High interest rates
- Massive illegal immigration
- Democrat lawfare
- Democrat violent riots
- Democrat assassination attempts of Trump
- Exploding global conflict
- Emboldened enemies due to US weakness
- Disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal
- Useless wasteful spending on Ukraine
- Higher real unemployment (U-6, not U-3)
- Increased trade deficits
- Exploded national debt
- Increased homelessness
- Increased depression and suicides
- Lower American life expectancy
- Explosion in excess deaths of young people (non-COVID)
- Increased political divisiveness
- Increased racial divisiveness
- Increased antisemitism
- Censorship regime
- Fewer small business (other than gig employee Schedule-Cs)
- Greater corporate consolidation
- More wealth transferred from the working class to the wealthy
Yeah, Joe has a legacy.
"Democrat assassination attempts of Trump”
As soon as you say that, your credibility goes completely out the window.
Well those assassins certainly were not Republicans.
And that automatically means they were Democrats? In fact the first one was just a mixed up kid who was after the first famous person to come within range. And he had previously donated to Republican causes. Or did you miss that part of the explanation.
You have prominent Democrats actually calling for and fantasizing about a Trump assassination. At the very least, the nasty and divisive Democrat rhetoric is a clear catalyst to pushing crazy people to do the FBI bidding to rid themselves of the Trump threat to their Democrat-connected power and careers.
Trying to claim that the assassination attempts were not Democrat-connected is a stretch.
A classic case of projection. Which prominent Democrats? Easy to claim in the abstract, hard to prove in the real world.
And in any case, you are apparently defending a past and future president whose direct suggestions of the use of violence against his political opponents have been documented many times - including on January 6th.
And by the way, if you think there aren’t any Republicans out there who would be happy to be rid of Trump, you are sadly mistaken.
There are not any real Republicans that want to be rid of Trump as without Trump those Republicans would be out of power washed up like the losing relics of Romney and McCain.
Here is a point to make... you are bright enough and informed enough that I can call your position here disingenuous as you clearly are are one with TDS and supportive of the extreme hyperbolic Democrat political rhetoric fomenting irrational public fear and hate against Trump. The Democrats pushed the fake Trump-Russia collusion, the fake "J6 insurrection" (it was just a protest with civil disobedience) and the lie that Trump is a fascist and threat to democracy. So yes, "Democrat assassination attempts" is accurate.
https://nypost.com/2024/07/17/us-news/democrats-who-made-offensive-posts-after-trump-assassination-attempt/
The record of presidents who have been truly transformational is pretty short - IMO Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, TR, FDR, and some might include JFK, although I think it would have taken a second term to have cemented that, if at all. Most of the others have done as well as could be expected, some under difficult circumstances. To my mind only one, Andrew Johnson was a complete disaster and of course he wasn’t directly elected to the office.
So to call Biden a mediocre president is not really a condemnation. And, as has certainly happened with other presidents, that designation may change over time.
The real problem, as it seems to me, is us. It is perhaps trite to say that we get the presidents we deserve and yet there is a great deal of truth to that. American voters are both the inheritors and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human government ever attempted.
But how many of us really understand the nature of that experiment, and then act upon it. More often, we act like the waves of some great political sea, moving this way and that under whichever moon mood controls the gravity of the moment. And so at various times we’ve enabled policies that are directly contradictory to our founding design - slavery, the exclusion of women from the franchise, and the entire Jim Crow era to name just three. Indeed, we were founded on the greatest contradiction of all - slavery in a nation dedication to freedom and individual rights.
The job of president of the United States has become over time the single most challenging in human history, bar none. The capacity to hold together this vast and fractious nation and at the same time to keep it even close to the promise and potential of the original design is a task to which I’m not at all sure any single human being ever born is up to. But if a substantial number of the American people are dead set against that design, even if they do not grasp the enormity of their intent, then who is to blame but we ourselves.
So now we’ve managed for the first time in our history to elect to the Presidency for the second time a man who utterly disdains three of our founding principles - our electoral process, our Constitution, and the rule of law. This is not Joe Biden’s fault. Yes, he overstayed his usefulness, but he did not pull the levers for Donald Trump - half of us did. Half of us failed in the essential duty of the citizenry of a republic - to act to maintain that most fragile of governments whatever flaws we may perceive it to have.
So many are calling Trump a transformational president. But he is the result of a transformational moment, not its cause. Half of us are its direct cause and the other half may well have given it away.
This statement discredits the entire article:
"For all the ink that has been expended on political events of the last year, it is surely incontrovertible that Donald Trump is the single most consequential political figure since Ronald Reagan, and arguably Franklin Roosevelt."
Don't get me wrong. Trump has his place in history. And I say that as someone who does not like him. But it's one thing to assert that Trump is the "single most consequential political figure" since Reagan or Roosevelt, it's something else entirely to state that such an observation is "surely incontrovertible." Actually, it's highly controvertible. In fact, you had better have a pretty good argument on hand to back up a statement like that one. And I would give that argument as fair a reading as I am capable of. But this columnist doesn't even offer one.
Making this column even more comically myopic is its ludicrous absence of self-awareness. After his grand and utterly unsupported historical declarations, the columnist then goes on to smugly declare that Biden is the one who lacks "mitigation" in making his judgements. This is exactly what it sounds like when a pot meets a kettle and screams, "Look how black you are!"
Seemingly unaware of how badly he's undermining his own thesis, the columnist then goes on to admit that Biden's presidency included: "a slew of major legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. This act was of a kind about which other Western leaders could only dream ... The results were spectacular"
So I ask you: where is the list of "major legislation" with "spectacular" results from the Trump presidency? Very few, if any, examples come to mind. He signed a tax cut, but the results most definitely were not "spectacular." And the only other thing I can think of is Operation Warp Speed (and that's being generous).
Sorry, but if you're going to hold up one president (Trump) as the "most consequential political figure" in a century of American history, and a second president (Biden) as a "mediocrity," shouldn't it be the ostensibly "consequential" President who has the impressive record of accomplishments? Rather than the other way around? Seriously, how do articles like this get past editors?
But it gets better. Determined to persist to the very end of this column with as little self-reflection as humanly possible, its author asserts "Talent will out in the end, they say, but so too will mediocrity." Yes, yes indeed. After reading this column, I could not agree more. But Biden is not the one that I have in mind.
Mediocre? Let’s not mince our words. He was fucking awful. Just fucking awful. Senile, volatile, arrogant, not in control of policy or his faculties, the nation left in the hands of dramatically mediocre apparatchik radicals who made predictably stupid decisions across the board. Did anyone get a load of wave after wave of lunatics nominated for the Federal bench? High percentage of nominees who couldn’t answer basic questions of Federal law and procedure.
Biden's failure is that he did not confront inflation and neither did Harris. Confronting inflation means first of all communicating to voters that you understand their pain. Second, it means proposing concrete steps to improve the income of the average working family to meet the rising costs of food, housing and energy. Third, it means confronting the greed of the companies which are raising prices. Forth, it means noting that the most inflationary period was the post covid surge which was inevitable.
Companies cost went up. That's a natural consequence of inflation. I agree that his refusal to acknowledge how serious it was cost Ds dearly
Costs went up during Covid. Harris/Biden should have stressed this point. The covid inflation was not due to his administration. I never once heard this on the campaign trail
Former Democrat Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former Obama CEA Chair Jason Furman warned Biden that the spending in the American Rescue Plan was adding fuel to the fire and risking inflation. The only disagreement was how much (some or all) of the blame should be placed on Biden era spending vs. other factors. https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/26/economy/inflation-larry-summers-biden-fed/index.html. https://www.crfb.org/blogs/voices-skeptical-size-19-trillion-covid-relief-plan
Interestingly, I continue to think Biden was one of the best presidents in my lifetime, against enormous odds.
You must be pretty young if that's the case. In fact, after Trump made a hash of things, he had things pretty much teed up for him, and he managed to mostly bollocks things up trying to be FDR when all the country really needed was clean up on aisles 5 (and 6)...
If there is one issue that summarizes Biden's presidency, it was his obsessive push for student debt forgiveness. The justification for student debt forgiveness, as opposed to any other type of debt forgiveness, was never made to the American people. Further, Biden never acknowledged the possibility that student debt forgiveness without a parallel plan to rein in higher education costs would be inflationary.
p.s. President Biden, of all people given his experience, never acted as if funding for student debt relief would have to come from Congress as is required by the US Constitution.
This kind of attack is exactly what’ is predictable at this point. There was a disastrous election result so of course you have to find someone to blame and Biden is an easy target right now. Kamala is next.
Although the timing might not have been best for taming the inflation that was already present when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, the economic argument I read was that " the IRA's actual inflationary impact was minimal, while its structural economic benefits appear more significant." https://climate.mit.edu/posts/economic-implications-climate-provisions-inflation-reduction-act... Actual investments are/will be spread over many years and so it would have had a very small immediate effect.
The American Rescue Plan (on top of the previous spending during the Trump years and the impact of COVID spending) was really what launched inflation. Inflation was already out of control, which is why they called a law that had nothing to do with fighting inflation the Inflation Reduction Act. Biden said that was one of the great regrets of his presidency.