I wish he had said something like
PERSON WOMAN CAMERA MAN TV,
does that work for you Peter?
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One thing I’ve noticed about some critics of Biden and the Democratic Party on the left end of the political spectrum is that (again…some of) them seem to want this country to become a leftist/progressive nation immediately, or with the next election. So when the Democratic Party’s candidate is someone who isn’t on the far left, all they want to do is point out their flaws. But that completely ignores the history of how we got so far to the right in the first place. We didn’t go from FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society to a right wing nightmare overnight with the election of Reagan in 1980. It started, as @anon61221983 pointed out above, with the election of Nixon and his employing of the southern strategy and starting the war on drugs. And Republicans ever since have been nudging the needle to the right a little bit every year. Some years they moved it a lot, some years not so much. But they kept nudging it. And with Trump’s election in 2016, they damn near achieved full on fascist dictatorship in 2020. But that took them 50+ years of nudging the needle. We’re not going to get things back to where they should be overnight. We have to start nudging the needle back to the left. Clinton didn’t really do that. Neither did Obama. Biden, on the other hand, has been nudging the needle to the left, and doing it successfully. He has very quietly put together the most progressive Presidential administration since LBJ. Is he perfect? Of course not. Is he great as the linked article says? Eh…that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but he’s been pretty damned good. I’ve said all this before, but I’m going to keep saying it as long as people are coming in here repeating old ideas about Biden that are largely based on the center-right Democratic Senator he was 20-30 years ago. He’s not that guy anymore. Do I wish we had someone younger and more to the left in there? Sure. But that’s just not realistic. We, as a country, aren’t there yet. We need to keep nudging the needle left. And giving up on Biden now is not nudging the needle left. It’s backing off and letting the Republicans shove it back to the right, undoing all the good that has been accomplished in Biden’s first term. Please don’t do that.
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Which is just maddening because people really go for this stuff without stopping to think “so wait how does banning drag shows or criminalizing abortion help me to feed my family again?”
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A neo-liberal is one who promotes neo-liberalism, which is a late 20th early 21st century political philosophy which entails free-market capitalism, deregulation, globalism over national economies, and reduced government spending. Think Clinton (both of them), Pelosi, Biden (for most of his career), etc. Obama, too, to some degree. I will conceded that Biden perhaps recently is cutting a less neoliberal stance, tho.
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This is a good take. Biden is by no means a ‘great president’, but he’s a) better than Trump, and b) we need to make sure if it is a head to head contest between those two, he is the decisive victor.
What are your criteria for a “great president?” Some of the best presidents, who made the most progressive advancement, were problematic and deviated rather notably from their prior track record and expectations. Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, LBJ were all problematic and were all supported by at least some mainstream, capitalistic structures - and promptly punched those structures in the nose. Look at Biden by what he’s actually done since January 2021, not by what he did in 1998 or 2002, and he’s so far been right in that kind of rarified company.
Edit: Oops. 
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He’s not just better than Trump. Biden is a very good President, in my opinion. Great might be an exaggeration, but saying he’s “better than Trump” is such a low bar that I don’t think it’s a useful assessment. Richard Nixon was a better President than Trump. My dog would be a better President than Trump. That’s seriously underselling Biden. He’s been good. Really, really good.
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… cough 2021
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Making a gaffe when describing Biden’s accomplishments is a bit on the nose, lol, so I think we should allow it.
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A lot less. Major elements of this act (esp. the Green New Deal, a callback to the Keynesian FDR era) are 2020 campaign promises fulfilled. They aren’t neoliberal ones.
Is it more watered down than we’d like? Of course. There’s also still Third-Way thinking in his administration, to be sure. Just as there was in Obama’s. However, there’s been steady and visible progress away from it.
I get it. You’re impatient. You want things now-now-now, without compromise. We all wish it were so. But serious people understand that’s not the world we live in. We also understand that we’re moving forward despite that.
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It’s far too early for a definitive ranking, but there are some out there that have already tried, giving him approx 19th out of 45… so, in the better half? Trump, of course, comes about where you’d expect… 43rd.
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I can’t give much credence to a ranking that rates Reagan higher than Biden.
Anyway, “a definitive ranking”? Because presidential historians said so? I don’t think their criteria necessarily match, well, mine, to name one person.
I don’t think that in this situation there is such a thing as a definitive ranking.
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Look, there have been maybe five or six “great” presidents in American history, and all of them were far from perfect, so I think that it would be more useful to tell us what you would like to see in a president above and beyond “someone better than Biden.”
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I seriously believe that many of Biden’s accomplishments have been deliberately kept quite to keep them from becoming fodder for the right-wing nutjobs. If you look at total numbers on student loan debt forgiven for example, it’s rather a lot, spread out in different guises. No, it’s not a big and flamboyant as it maybe should be, but hundreds of thousands of people are now more financially secure.
And say the perfect progressive president was elected tomorrow-would they be able to actually get anything done with the current house and senate? The house can’t even pass a budget! To generate true progressive change in this country there will have to be way more progressives, running as progressives, working to get elected way down the ticket-school boards, city councils, state legislations. Maybe even a governor or three. Because a president working by fiat is a bad idea, even if the changes they want are changes I might want as well.
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Good example. In the 1960s, public universities were practically tuition-free. Once desegregation kicked in, there was a concerted (and remarkably effective) effort by a coalition of business interests, racists, and religious fundies (yes, that’s a heavily-overlapping Venn diagram) to defund education. That is the origin of the extremely overinflated college costs we currently see. It took 50-60 years to get here. Why is the expectation it can be undone overnight? Yet Biden has done more to roll that back than most if not all Dems in the 21st century.
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i will say that the dem establishment has been quite against that. both for ideological reasons and because many seem to believe that catering to the right is a winning strategy
it’s my honest hope that biden’s quiet, progressive steps might actually result in changing that equation… if he wins reelection of course. ( and a landside wouldn’t hurt )
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Trump is personally responsible for some percentage of the mess international affairs in in today.
He helped embolden the far right Netanyahu government by moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He screwed up the international sanctions policy which had kept Iran from exploring nuclear power. He lushed up to North Korea so he could feel like a big stateman. He emboldened Putin by threatening the future of Nato. He pissed off China by his trade war sanctions.
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Yes, our larger point… because he had to cut a deal with the progressive wing of the party or they were not gonna back him. That is how normal politics works.
Trump is definitely the worst president… the one who died like 20 days into office was better, ,FFS. No other president failed, and then tried to lead a fucking insurrection.
right! I mean… yeesh…
Yes, I’m aware and agree with that… he’d actively make the genocide happening worse if he got back into office. All that you outlined there shows that he’s unfit to lead on US foreign policy in today’s fucked up world. He would ensure a larger war, as much as him and his followers claim to be “isolationist”… they just want a war were they can kill the “right” people in their minds (not “white” Russians, for example, who they admire).
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