I'm a loyal Democrat who's already tired of Joe Biden

Joe Biden was really appealing when the alternative was Donald Trump. But after a year of Biden's presidency, my attitude toward him ranges from grudging acceptance to outright irritation.

Today I'm at the bottom of my personal Joe Biden approval rating. And there's a good chance my mood is going to darken further.

I've got this theory -- not exactly original to me -- that a person's good qualities also are their bad qualities. It just depends on how those qualities are expressed, and their context.

Along with lots of other people, I relished having a calm, competent, low-key president in the White House after four years of Trumpian chaos. Now, though, those qualities are looking more like liabilities, especially since competent is fading away as a Biden descriptor.

My current gripe with Biden, and it's a significant one, is that he pretty much ignored voting rights legislation until very recently, when he gave a speech in Georgia about the urgent need for Congress to pass two voting rights bills.

Too late and too little, Joe. 

Today Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin both announced that they aren't willing to do away with the Senate filibuster even if that's necessary to pass voting rights legislation, which it definitely is. 

Also today, Sinema and Manchin met with Biden at the White House to discuss their position on the filibuster. So far there hasn't been any word that Biden changed their mind, probably because he didn't.

I get it that Sinema and Manchin are really difficult to deal with, being full of themselves, refusing to negotiate in an honest fashion, and uncaring of whether they're acting in the best interest of their constituents in Arizona and West Virginia.

Still, it sure seems like Biden has been weak in how he's interacted with them, choosing to play the role of Mr. Nice Guy rather than President Who Should Be Feared. 

Lyndon Johnson played that latter role well. So did Trump. Again, I don't want Biden to be Trump-lite, just that he display some of the aggression and passion that makes Trump beloved by his base.

Early on in January 2021, congressional Democrats said that voting rights bills would be a top priority. As Republicans in state after state passed their own legislation to make it harder to vote, especially for  black and brown people, voting rights should have risen to the top of Biden's agenda.

But it didn't. 

Covid relief bills did. Then the bipartisan infrastructure bill did. After that, the Build Back Better bill was pushed by Biden.

It made sense to focus on Covid given how the pandemic was ravaging our country. However, Biden botched the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which was supposed to go hand-in-hand with the Build Back Better bill -- social/climate change infrastrucure as opposed to physical infrastructure. 

Manchin and Sinema were heavily invested in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. That should have given Biden leverage for him to use in pressing for them to do a carve-out of the filibuster on voting rights legislation.

And leverage to get them to commit to supporting the Build Back Better bill. Now that bill is stuck, going nowhere fast. Biden seems to have given up on it after Manchin said he's done talking about it. 

Yet last year Biden cajoled progressive House Democrats to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which already had been approved by the Senate, when he assured them that Manchin had bought off on a framework for Build Back Better, so now the two bills could be decoupled.

Build Back Better contains half a billion dollars or so of vitally needed support for our country's efforts to combat global warming. 

So Biden is batting .000 on the two legislative areas that mean the most to me, and many other Democrats: voting rights and climate change. I've read that Manchin was willing to go along with a $1.8 trillion Build Back Better bill that included all that money to fight global warming.

Biden reportedly walked away from that agreement for some reason. Unforgivable. 

Since I'm 73, not a whole lot younger than Biden, it pains me to say that Biden is looking more and more to me like a kindly grandfather whose best days are behind him.

Sadly, he hasn't given Vice-President Harris much of a viable role in his administration, because while Harris has her own weaknesses, she's more energetic and a much better speaker.

My mood toward Biden definitely would perk up if somehow he could pull off a win on either voting rights or Build Back Better.

Right now, though, it looks like neither legislation is going to pass. Since Republicans are favored to take back the House in November of this year, this means Biden has little time left to get his first term agenda through Congress.

And I haven't even mentioned the failure of Biden and his fellow Democrats to do anything about police reform and immigration reform. No wonder Biden's approval rating is so low. When he's losing many members of his own party, there's no way to go but down.

Comments

[Jack Holloway]

Brian --

One thing that you must remember and keep in mind at all times when discussing or thinking about Biden: He is a Republican. He has always been a Republican.

He had the misfortune, when he first decided that he wanted to run for public office, of living in an area where it was simply impossible for Republicans to get elected to anything, so he had to pretend to be a Democrat. He has been pretending ever since.

All over the interwebs, there are long lists of Biden's campaign promises that he has already broken. None of them come anywhere close to including all of the promises he's broken. Here's just one of those lists, for example:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/11/bidens-broken-promises-spell-hard-times-ahead/

[Jack Holloway]

Oh, and one of the most important broken promises of all, here --

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-rivers-pitt/99585/despite-his-promises-biden-is-still-serving-fossil-fuel-interests

[Walker]

Give Biden the majorities in the House and Senate that LBJ had, along with the much stronger party discipline of pre-PAC-dominated campaign financing, and Biden _would_ be LBJ. Biden’s presidency has been poised on the knife’s edge of a 50-50 Senate and narrow House majority since Day 1, and now people for whom instant gratification isn’t soon enough are throwing up their hands, not even one year into a term spent dealing with an unprecedented wreck of a prior administration that was actively seeking to overthrow Democracy and with a GOP that has remained 100% united in support of dismantling majority rule in America.

[Jack Holloway]

and . . .

Joe Biden has spent his entire political career making life miserable for desperate people who cannot fight back.

Here's another example:
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/01/18/biden-lies-again-as-he-covertly-continues-the-u-s-forever-war-against-the-afghan-people/

[Jack Holloway]

and yet another . . .

More than 18 years ago, Elizabeth Warren published a multi-count indictment of Joe Biden's legislative and political history.

It was actually titled:

Harvard Law School Public Law
Research Paper No. 032

What is a Women's Issue?
Bankruptcy, Commercial Law and
Other Gender-Neutral Topics

by Elizabeth Warren
Harvard Women's Law Journal Vol. 23, Spring, 2002

Considering that Biden was named (not favorably) 40 times (25 times in the text and 15 times in footnotes) in the 56-page document, it's clear that she intended to make a very strong point about Biden's lack of concern for women, children, debtors and the entire non-privileged portion of the US population.

The paper can be accessed here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=310544&mod=article_inline

If for some reason you cannot access the entire document from the site, I have the original pdf.

[Walker]

Mitch McConnell told us exactly how his strategy works: Make government look dysfunctional and get the media to blast the Dem president for failing to secure "unity."

It's working. Three new polls show Biden slipping badly with core Dem groups and indys:

washingtonpost.com
Opinion | Mitch McConnell’s plan is working
How McConnell's obstruction playbook really works for Republicans.

[Walker]

By the way, the above is a quoted tweet from Greg Sergeant — I thought it would display as a quote and show his authorship.