President also regrets picking Merrick Garland for attorney general, as he was slow to prosecute Trump for January 6
Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year’s presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election – despite negative poll indications, White House sources have said.
The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garland as attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection while presiding over a justice department that aggressively prosecuted Biden’s son Hunter.
Harris’s ascent to the top of the ticket led to a surge of enthusiasm and improved poll numbers but ultimately ended in a decisive electoral college and popular vote defeat.
Buddy, you barely fuckin beat him when all the COVID deaths he caused were still fresh in the American minds. Biden won 2020 because he was "anyone else," but his dementia-addled mind has convinced himself that he's a heroic champion of the people who beat back fascism with his incredible intellect. All of the statistical evidence the public has access to predicted a catastrophic Biden loss, but I guess the lesson the DNC has learned from 2024 is that they should give up on objective reality as well.
He woulda lost for sure. He'll be bitter in his old age, but that's fine. He was on the wrong side of many issues throughout history, so I don't feel the least bit bad for him.
I also think it'd be dumb for Biden to have stayed in the race but in retrospect he's the most progressive president we've had in my lifetime (I was born during Reagan's administration).
The response to the genocide in Gaza, in particular, was a huge political misstep - in terms of party popularity it seems to have been more costly than the Iraq War.
Biden did a lot of other shit especially investments in tech and manufacturing that are already paying huge dividends. It's actually astonishing he managed to get a high precision TSMC plant in AZ due to the existential threat that may cause to Taiwan and greenlighting plant reconstruction through the NRC may be a godsend if we're able to start fighting climate change again in 2028 (America may still be dumb as shit though).
It'll take some time to really measure how these investments will fully mature but as much as I hate him for not rejecting genocide he has otherwise been the least shit president I've ever lived under.
He was great for the country and corporations. He was shit for the people. He forgot who actually votes until all he could do was try to gaslight us about a split recovery.
While he does technically clear the low bar of most progressive from himself, Obama, and Clinton, I have to point out that the spotlight issue you present here for the most progressive president is corporate subsidies for national defense purposes.
I don't think he would have won. I do however think that because he quit he put a lot of doubt in the Democratic Party. And the voters may have gone the other way based purely on that.
Best I can do is the youngest senate president pro tempore in over 50 years. She's 74.
That's Patty Murray by the by, she's who would become president if they make Musk speaker of the house and they botch the handoff. It wouldn't happen but it's funny to think that America could get it's first Woman president by a few men's incompetence.
Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year’s presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election – despite negative poll indications, White House sources have said.
Biden was behind by 5 points when he dropped out and was slipping by the day. He had zero chance of defeating Trump. Regardless of the reality of the situation or what you think of his policies, the general public wanted someone to blame, and they decided that person was Biden. Doesn't matter what he did or didn't do. People decided Biden was the scapegoat, and nothing was going to change that.
The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garland as attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection while presiding over a justice department that aggressively prosecuted Biden’s son Hunter.
This is 100% correct. Biden gave Garland the AG slot as a make-good over the fact that his Supreme Court nomination got railroaded. I'm also sure that the thought process, even though it could never be spoken, was that Garland would aggressively pursue Trump as revenge for his SC nod getting snubbed. Instead, we got an AG who intentionally sat on his hands for four years and slow-walked prosecutions that a first-year intern should have been able to handle.
Biden made two mistakes in this regard. First, he allowed himself to be paralyzed by optics and fear that Trump would frame any action as political persecution and interference, as if Trump wasn't going to do that anyway. His second mistake was not replacing Garland as AG sooner. Optics my ass, if you know the AG is sitting on a case with overwhelming evidence and is not prosecuting that case, replace the fucking AG.
Harris’s ascent to the top of the ticket led to a surge of enthusiasm and improved poll numbers but ultimately ended in a decisive electoral college and popular vote defeat.
But at the end of the day, she could not overcome the greatest sin of all -- trying to run for President while being a black woman.
It’s an existing meme, I believe originally from right wing dumbf*ks but nicely fitting for this occasion. He had 4 years to make something out of it, he didn’t do bad at all but this is a bit of a silly statement.
He did a massive amount of good for all the disaffected angry voters out there, far more good than any president of the last 40 years. Inflation was bad, but not as bad as elsewhere, and we didn't go into a recession when everyone predicted we would. His programs were most targeted at the working class, whose wages rose more than under any other recent President. All the lip service pols give about helping the middle class, none of them have done it except ol' Joe. Most other Dem pols have a strong neo-liberal streak, but Biden is an old-school union Dem.
So many GOP pols taking credit in their districts for programs funded by Biden policies, but which they voted against. So many angry voters who are so much better off because of Biden policies voted for the guy that's going to rip it all up. Truth doesn't matter, propaganda wins, "throw the bums out, I'm cranky" is as far as most voters get in their thinking, and it's going to destroy the country.
he was supporting segregation policies way back when and has always supported nonprogressive policies and based his thinking on Catholicism
wtf did he do that deserves any kind of praise?
being vice to Obama and having Harris as a vice and supporting outdated nonmodern religious right leaning policies does not make him a savior to anyone
He's been around a long time, and has negotiated a lot of deals between the Dems and the GOP. Someone willing to compromise with half the country isn't someone to hate on, it's someone who wants to get some good done.
Look at all the labor union success under Biden, compared to the phenomenal downward trend of labor power ever since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. Decades of failure of union power until Biden. Under Biden, the autoworkers got their first major win in decades, railroad workers got a better deal than they were originally asking for due to Biden's negotiators (after he had ordered them back to work), unionization at Starbucks, Amazon... none of this happens without Biden, the first POTUS to walk a picket line. You want to hate on neoliberalism, I'll join you, but Biden is not that guy.
Inflation reduction act, chips, a pretty decent student loan forgiveness program (best he could do with SCOTUS), pardoning federal marijuana convictions come to mind...
You're just uninformed. The absolute most that a grocery item went up was eggs, at 160%, and that has a lot to do with a bird flu epidemic. Most groceries went up ~30%, during a period of worldwide inflation. Fuck off with your disinformation.
This is one of the issues I have with criticism of Harris.
The woman had no control over the situation. She couldn't exactly force Biden to drop out. There was no time for a primary. The woman was handed chicken shit and was expected to turn in into chicken salad with barely 3 months to go. The fact that she even made it competitive with 3 months to go, Biden's numbers in the toilet, and her own popularity numbers in the sewer is itself a miracle.
The woman was given cement shoes, told to sprint, and everybody shits all over her for only being able to jog.
Kamala had a lot of enthusiasm behind her when she took over the campaign. Then she squandered all of it by hiring the same hacks who lost to Trump in 2016. If she hadn't sidelined Walz, or ignored the Uncommitted movement, or ran on the kind of left-wing economic message that won in 2020, she might have had a chance.
Biden, however, had no chance. Even if he had reversed course on Gaza and adopted left-wing economic populism, he was doomed from the moment he walked on that debate stage. Everyone was worried that he was old and senile, and it turns out they were right. Nothing was going to make the American people vote for him after that became public.
Yeah, don't let rich donors run your party. Their cold feet cost us the country. My worry from the beginning of that whole episode was that they underestimated the number of voters who just would not vote for a black woman, period. They would rather get raped by an old white man than helped by a black woman.
This all would have been discovered if they did a proper primary. Instead rich donors at the top of the Democratic organization decided that they knew what was best, and that they didn't need the voters.