The Good, the Bad, and the Biden
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What is the assessment of Biden's presidency?
All signs seem to indicate that one week from today, the United States will break from recent tradition and have a peaceful transition of power. It felt like a good time to assess Joe Biden's presidency, which his staff would have you believe is one of the most consequential in American history. FDR-esque.
I admire their loyalty to their boss, but I think Biden is... a pretty mid-tier, mediocre president. I don't think he's awful. I don't think he's a horrible threat to freedom the way that you might hear on Truth Social. The main way I would describe Joe Biden is that he was an unusually weak president. And he was, in many important moments, loath to decide when we really needed a president to decide. And I think that ultimately made him less effective than he could have been in the moment.
The good, the bad, and the Biden. Vox's Dylan Matthews is gonna help us assess on Today Explained.
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Today, explain Sean Rama's firm here with Dylan Matthews from Vox, who thinks President Biden was ultimately a weak president.
So I think there's sort of the causes of the weakness and there's the symptoms of the weakness. And I think the causes of the weakness, there's a bunch. Joe Biden is really old. Like, it's a hard thing to get around.
Breaking news. Come on, man.
And I think being the president is a very hard and demanding job. And the amount of energy and focus you're able to bring to it really affects how impactful you can be. Bill Clinton was famous for staying up till 2, 3 in the morning, like, poring over policy documents with aides, trying to sort things out. But Biden seems like he was perhaps the opposite extreme.
I was exhausted. I didn't listen to my instincts.
There's been some reporting from the Wall Street Journal that a lot of decisions got devolved down to his national security advisor or his economic counsel that ordinarily would be decisions for the president, that he had sort of good days and bad days, days when he could hear stuff and days when he couldn't.
The Wall Street Journal is out with a new bombshell report where they spoke to about 50 people or more involved in the Biden White House. According to the Journal, there were limits over who Biden spoke with and what they said to him. It's going back to the start of his presidency, even cabinet members who were kept at arm's length.
That's going to make you sort of weaker and less effective. But I think a lot of it also has to do with his position within the party. If you go back to the 2020 primary, it was not as though Joe Biden won a sweeping mandate that showed he was much more popular than everyone else running against him. I think that left him sort of owing a lot of people a lot of favors and who had to manage a lot of different factions. And I think that that put him in less of a good position to make difficult decisions and expect people to follow him.
Why is Biden considered a weak president?
Let's talk for a moment about what he actually did, his major accomplishments, and whether they'll be remembered in 10 years or not, starting with the American Rescue Plan. Remind us what that was and what Joe Biden did and didn't do in terms of, you know, the priorities there.
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