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Student debt too… he tried to cancel it and got blamed for being obstructed

I know there's a GOP death cult allergic to spending any money on people but the COVID stimulus worked and masking worked and the fact that liberals didn't complain more about them being stripped away gives any credit I give to the Biden years a big asterisk.

It could also be that conservative control over the media has reached a point of no return post 2016. In which case there is literally nothing he could do.

It’s sad AND true that Biden was the best President of my lifetime. Even with his inexcusable stance on Israel’s monstrous Gaza actions

Smear effort. Were Biden and establishment Dems doing anything for 'the left' or was it the min they felt they had to do for the working class they had their flunkies claim was doing fine? Manchin did better.

More free trade would have arguably helped him in the face of inflation, something he could have pointed to as “here’s what I’m doing to lower prices”.

No credit for Afghanistan withdrawal, no credit for increasing manufacturing, no credit for being the most pro-labor prez since FDR. No prez will ever, ever, ever again choose to absorb temporary inflation across the whole economy to avoid unemployment rising a few percent for the poorest, ever

Also took a massive political hit by ripping the bandaid off of Afghanistan as well as ending the drone war.

And to continue yelling loudly about doing good things on all channels

2 problems: at the time of the election Americans were in a worse SoL position generally than in 2021, no cheques with a name on it had come. Second: under no circumstances do you gotta hand it to Mr. Genocide is fine Lotta positive left noises about Biden pre Oct 7 for ending the war

We would have been better off cancelling all tariffs and crushing the longshoreman unions by finally modernising the ports. The fuck is the point of all that industrial policy if the unions just stab you in the back after you save their pensions.

I also think that people are greatly overestimating how much the ARP was an intentional attempt to get full employment at the risk of inflation. We were still shut down in most places over covid. It was highly uncertain how much and how quickly the economy would recover.

It wasn’t just “the left” complaining my about price increases

? Hillary was very free-trade til the 2016 primary forced her off it.

Sadly yes, and I don't think much of the progressive left has reckoned with this yet huge unforced error on progressives for not fighting back against inflation doomerism.

This is really stupid. Inflation under Biden wasn't driven by wage increases but by corps jacking up prices to increase profits. Leftists were 100% correct to excoriate Biden for defending capital during this time. Yes, wage inequality matters, but the capital-labour balance of power matters more.

@skyview.social unroll please this memento thread to Biden's awesome stimulus, and not getting and maybe not taking credit for it.

Trump's obviously illegal shit gets blocked by the courts, and right wingers blame the courts and threaten impeachment and worse. Biden's good shit gets blocked by the courts, and online lefties blame Biden and say this is why Dems suck and you shouldn't vote for them.

Dems (and myself) perhaps overlearned the lessons of the post-2008 lost decade, but it's still an important lesson imo. recessions are not popular, that's like the most robust finding in all of political science

Feels like the pubic debates for the 2010 midterms were about undeserving people getting bailouts (which was absurd) and an incoherent debate about the ACA (also absurd, but in different ways)

A recession killing their run is dependent on it becoming the theme and being tied to them. I doubt the media has the will to do either of those things. Something else will be the problem of the day. Obstruction will be the cause, not the implemented policies.

Trump can barely talk. But Republicans have a robust media infrastructure that can turn imaginary trans teens in sports into a top issue and convince voters a good economy is a disaster. Dems urgently need to build one. Or lose elections after we've cleaned up R messes to boredom.

I think it’s definitely notable that AMLO/Morena in Mexico defied a lot of the global trends and AMLO’s big political innovation was…daily briefings directed at the public

They call it "the bully pulpit" for a reason

Like I think a Job Guarantee would be good policy ofc for enshrining permanent full employment, but it’s also (if done well) much better politics bc it’s a BILL, something clearly produced by elected officials on your behalf, with a simple, big idea: everyone has a right to a job now, period.

The Biden administration absolutely sold their agenda, but it didn't matter when every journalist wanted to prove they didn't have a liberal bias by privileging Republican talking points and Biden's own party pushed the message that the economy was bad because polling said people thought it was bad.

Shienbaum in Mexico is doing regular streams to explain policy and what it does. The party over here meanwhile is forming a rapid response team that consists of a guy who had to quit because he died a week later and they sent emails to CNN.

this was another double edged sword of the Biden admin, where behind closed doors they were incredibly anti-immigrant, but they knew it was a message killer so they still got raked over the coals on immigration because Republicans are free to lie for some reason

Another element of it is it was political malpractice to let Trump put his name on the covid checks, and then the Dems doubled down on that failure with keeping Biden's name off the last check. For a lot of people the conclusion was simply "Trump sent me free money and I never got shit from Biden".

Yup, this is it

They were very bad at selling their accomplishments but also in the early stages of the reelection campaign when they were trying to run on "Bidenomics" people on the old site would say it was evil to try to claim the economy was good or that anyone anywhere had been helped at all.

median voter, trying to make heads or tails of this tweet, decides it's a dirty joke about the size of their respective packages

have been needed for security reasons, but most didn't.

I personally disagree with this, but if you’re a Democratic politician or policy maker you need to think long and hard about what the electorate is rewarding and what it is punishing.

And the party definitely did her wrong and people should be furious they put a 70-something year old with a cancer diagnosis in over a more junior rep with national profile and recognition because she’s further left than the donors like

The left position was “genocide is bad, we should stop funding that” and the response was violent police suppression of protests, refusal to give ground at the convention, and wild accusations from party members at other party members. And they was mostly before the primary challenges

Scratch an American, a treatlerite bleeds

If people thought we could weather tariffs. Those people can weather a wage increase

Kind of annoying how we finally got to try adequate fiscal policy based demand management right at the moment when we were having inflationary supply shocks for unrelated reasons

swap fast food prices with interest rates

Folks with 3 jobs and an eviction notice sitting on their kitchen table were being told the economy was amazing. Biden got shit b/c while his folks were rejecting some completely bananas mergers & enforcing existing laws Dem Admins have ignored for decades the corporations were literally killing us.

The fake left thinks they're smart and informed people. Indeed. They got crushed by the GOP and all they can say is mean shit about the former president.

Obviously not.

theweek.com/articles/950...

i would go further and say that people actively hated full employment.

The left called his student loan policies “worse than nothing”

The dems overperformed midterm expectations, then opinions on the economy turned negative as they turned off the covid era welfare state. Obviously the lesson to be learned is people didn't like the welfare state.

my understanding from the consultant types I know was that it was a strategy comms team did not realize until too late was not working as intended (other people realized and were freaking out)

Biden failed at many "things"... he was blocked from many "things". He achieved many "things" and "things" that would have come to fruition if the current govt didnt fuck it all up. The "things" coming to fruition are being claimed as this govts win and we just let it happen without calling it out.

what many things did he fail at again?

Even before it got stymied in the courts had already preemptively moved the goalposts to “no means testing whatsoever”, moving away from a broadly popular idea and choosing to plant their flag on a wildly unpopular one.

Larry Summers was on every station yelling about stagflation and the need to jack up interest rates, while Manchin was railing about an entitlement society and Biden was touting AUKUS, which Australians don't even give a shit about.

This! And I feel like it started with Obama and everyone backing away from ACA instead of full-throat support. The program is popular, despite this communications failure, not because of it.

100%

Exactly this. I get the impulse to let actions speak for themselves, but that’s not how this works. As crass as it may be, you have to hit people over the head with it, even if it means being a dick about it. It was infuriating how they let Rs take credit for the stimulus they voted against.

communication is a two way street

Great quote I just read on this very subject apnews.com/article/aust...

Also, you can’t insist on doing everything in a “bipartisan” manner and then complain that voters don’t give you more credit than the GOP.

Almost immediate unending stories about some chief economist at a financial firm predicting a recession with near certainty in the next 12 months (rolling)

Pandemic is memory holed.

(The genocide thing was also kind of a bummer)

Yeah I'm not sure, I think he gets more credit than you might think, expectations were pretty low of him going in.

Yep. It's so frustrating. Future Dem administrations will opt for high unemployment over high inflation.

But not like *that* lol Clown ass public

Meh. Harris had a shitty position on Israel and Gaza, OTT, her administration would have furthered every goal of the far left, except maybe single handedly dismantling the military industrial congressional complex. (Thats beyond the abilities of any one person.) But look at what's burning now!

Big, big difference between these two things. A bigger stimulus was probably good. Not ending Trump's tariffs was a terrible economic policy that raised inflation and prevented him and Harris from capitalizing on one of their most politically popular differences from him.

Bails out the Teamsters and the Teamsters endorsed Trump

A very strong argument that he was the most left wing economic president of my lifetime (born JFK admin) and the strongest Keynesian ever, and all they did was crap on him. Never again will you see a Dem do that, and from this point forward at best you get a Clinton/Obama type econ policy.

I think that last sentence has been true largely for perhaps a century. The far right propagandized throughout the Depression and WW2 and delivered McCarthyism soon after the wars end. Propaganda is a powerful tool and is most effective to the more smooth brained voters.

How you do something in politics is as important as what you do. Centrists routinely interact with progressives using a tone of sneering contempt. Sorry, but that poisons the relationship.

does the book have quotes from gop congressmen saying they would have switched their no's to yeses if the number had been higher? From Blue Dog Dems who said at the time they would have voted no if the number had been higher?

Plus Afghanistan.

The transit advocates give him full credit for continuing to wreck rail procurement with Buy America.

An oldie: bsky.app/profile/stev...

Dems should embrace better trade with allies, it shouldn't be up to Canada 🇨🇦 to come up with ideas, what about cleaning up great lakes, security, border adjustments on GHG?

if they had political brains (they don't) they would be all about Biden as their martyred saint taken out by corporate overlords for being too left, Biden will never return so they could just use his legacy for free. but of course their pet niche issue was more important than everything