Joseph and The Coat of Many Expectations
President Joe Biden boards Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, Friday, January 5, 2024, en route to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland.(Official White House Photo by Carlos Fyfe)
In covering the latest round of Biden Administration student loan forgiveness plans hand crafted to make a good headline while navigating around the Supreme Court, Zolan Kanno-Youngs expressed a recurring theme of frustration by President Biden and his supporters
The struggle illustrates a broader challenge facing the White House, according to interviews with Democratic officials, loan relief advocates and voters. In many ways, Mr. Biden has become a victim of the high expectations set by his initial sprawling proposals, leaving many voters disappointed over what he has failed to pass even as he has notched substantial policy wins on a number of fronts.
The president made the most ambitious investment to combat climate change in history, but polls have found that most Americans are unaware of his signature climate law. Despite a major stimulus bill and large investments in infrastructure and health, voters believe he has not accomplished much. And even many voters who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 are not impressed with the economy, despite falling inflation falls and unemployment near historic lows.
But Mr. Biden’s aides believe the student debt cancellation can be a way to quickly improve the lives of some Americans and help turn the tide on his low approval numbers.
Spoiler alert: the student loan debt forgiveness schemes, in all their variation, will not be a quick fix to President Biden’s poll numbers for the same reason most of the other policies, initiatives, executive orders, and proposed programs have those poll numbers right where there are.
“Oh expectation,” wrote Mary Shelley in one of her non-Frankenstein works, “what a frightful thing art thou, when kindled more by fear than hope!”
Expectations of Joe Biden is a case study in filters. First elected to the US Senate in 1972, Joe Biden has as much book on who he is, what he is, and how he goes about it as anyone in modern political history. Decades of public service, thousands of votes in the US Senate, untold hours of speeches, remarks, and comments…there is virtually nothing about Joe Biden you can’t find a clip of Joe Biden explaining to you over the years. Of course, there is a tremendous difference in Biden of the various decades as both times and the man have changed, but the core of how Joe Biden goes about the business of being Joe Biden is all there for folks to find.
But expectations change based on events. The blowhard senior US Senator is different from the jovial free-form Sheriff Joe of the Obama Administration is different than the successful-on-the-third-try presidential candidate Joe Biden. That last one is what really throws folks off in setting expectations and a bearing on who and what Joe Biden is, was, and can be. Nothing changes expectations and perceptions like becoming president.
Thus, to properly set expectations for Joe Biden and his administration, one has to first start with a proper perspective of how he became president. Every political party and candidate will call every win a mandate for this, that, and the other, but usually elections are far more complicated. The 2020 presidential election, however, was not complicated at all. The issue before the American people was perhaps the simplest general election issue in modern politics: a referendum on then-president Donald Trump.
Accountability starts with self, so let me pause here and put my own hand up that I was wrong about the 2020 primaries. My own expectations of Joe Biden were exceedingly low, and you can read my wrongness in all its glory here. It wasn’t that I was inaccurate in assessing the totality of Joe Biden’s career up to that point, all well-documented and bare for the world to examine. My mistake was running with the hope of a traditional primary campaign instead of assessing the fear and loathing of Donald Trump. I was wrong, Biden and his team were right.
I was hardly alone, of course. Biden’s 2020 campaign was all but left for dead in the horserace media coverage after Iowa and New Hampshire, until a funny thing happened in South Carolina. Democratic primary voters took a look at the state of the race and ran, not walked, to the polls to surge Joe Biden to the nomination and then a record-setting general election win.
Herein lies the key to Joe Biden expectations. Whatever “why” of Biden’s 2020 win over Trump one settles on is usually the base alloy of the perception structure folks have of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. since. If Biden won chiefly for just being “not Trump” then all the issues, quirks, and political baggage his 50 years of politics explain the measure of the man for good, bad, and indifferent. If one views Biden as the great savior who rescued the country from Trump, and thus all his previous sins are washed away for that great righteous electoral act, then expectations get artificially inflated.
The middling polling bears evidence the wider populace takes the former viewpoint while the writing of pieces like the above from the New York Times shows a cadre of news media and commentators — a cadre the Biden Administration is most likely to be monitoring — are running with the latter. That disconnect is the headwaters of the frustration Team Biden and their supporters are expressing in wondering why they are getting no credit, and the parallel implication that it all isn’t fair.
But politics in American isn’t about credit and fair. If you want credit go talk to Mastercard. Fair is an uncatchable phantom that makes anyone pursuing it look foolish for the effort, unless it is the once-a-year county variety where you ride the rides and play the games. Senator Biden, Ol’ Joe, Uncle Joe, Sheriff Joe, all were judged differently because they didn’t have the weight of expectation and the public ledger of what President Joe Biden has and hasn’t accomplished under his executive leadership. Clothing Joe Biden in expectations that don’t match the reality is just cultivating future surprises when Joe Biden turns out to be Joe Biden, emperor with the same clothes he has always had on.
But the good news for Joe Biden is he still isn’t Donald Trump, and four years later that is still his best argument to most voters. Fear is more his electoral friend than hope, as fear of more Donald Trump gets him far more votes than any hope that a Biden second term will be the bright shiny future of America. And fear will probably be enough to win round two of Biden vs Trump, as even a declining President Biden still seems within the margins acceptable to an increasingly unhinged and unrestrained Donald Trump.
If Joe Biden does win again, just keep it in perspective, and base that perspective of what is actually happening with the real-life man, not some great expectations of the great American political drama.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/02/this-is-excellent-news-for-john-mccain-3
Fun fact, there is a twitter account which tracks how the Grey Lady edits its headlines in real time. The original headline was “Biden Cancels $1.2 billion in Student Loan Debt for 150,000 borrowers.” It became “A beleaguered Biden Chips Away at Student Debt, Bit by Bit.”
Honestly, this change is basically a hit job because the loudest crowd of people on student debt relief are probably people with degrees from prestigious universities but underpaid jobs like journalists or editorial assistants.
I think we of the chronically online tend to listen to the loudest and most complaining voices but Democrats have over performed in most general and special elections since 2022.Report
Biden’s biggest political problem is that while the average voter might like him fine, the part of the left in charge of publishing opinions don’t like him because he’s not one of them, and doesn’t really pander to them. Also, he boring. I personally think that’s a point in his favour (He’s the least interesting President in decades, and that’s great), but it’s a point against him for people who’s job it is to write stories that attract eyeballs.Report
Say what you will about Donald Trump, but the man moved product.
The big problem that Biden has is the whole “overpromise/underdeliver” thing.
It’s not that he’s *BAD*… it’s just that the vibes are off and it feels like stuff should be better than it is.
There are people whose job it is, apparently, to tell us how good the economy is. There are plenty of people out there, however, who are not saying “yeah, the economy is really good” but “look at my grocery bill!”
There are also people whose job it is, apparently, to tell us how we should care less about the price of groceries than we do. They aren’t particularly persuasive, though.
Maybe things will turn around by summer. Maybe nothing crazy will happen as we’ll just have a slow and steady recovery from the only-technically-a-recession and Trump will look very bad comparatively to a slow and steady Biden.Report
There is defintely a lot of hate directed at Biden because he went to the University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School rather than the established Ivies.Report
This is one of the better things about him IMO. The ivies seem to be teeming with weirdos, at least these days.Report
At least Biden didn’t have a plagiarism scandal.Report
Heh, not that we know about!
But to the larger issue I think we as a society and out governing class would benefit to stop looking to those places for leadership. The people that come out of it are either part of the big intersectionality cult of group think or the small federalist society rebel cult of group think, none of whom are particularly in touch with the reality based community. I’m convinced that people deeply into this stuff lack anything close to the perspective necessary to be making important decisions for the country.Report
A plagiarism scandal knocked him off of his 1988 presidential election run.Report
(that’s the joke)Report
Biden’s biggest political problem is that Op Ed columnists from elite universities are not deep enough in the bag for him?Report
The people at the NY Times are not “the part of the left in charge of publish opinions.” I would argue most of the left is not in charge of the mainstream media. There is a section of the left that is as you describe him but they are a small but very loud minority and write for what used to be called the little magazines. Places like Jacobin.
I think what journalists hate about Biden is that he is competent, boring, and runs a tight ship. Trump was a barge of tires on fire going at full speed into an oil refinery. Journalists like that, he ,made their job easy. Biden doesn’t.
Plus they want things to be equal so they can have their lazy and easy reporting horserace. Here is a handy chart: https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/real-reason-for-biden-age-talkReport
The NYT has made a habit of cleaning up Trump and packaging him as a unconventional but still reasonable political actor.
Here’s an example, comparing their headline to another outlet.
The Independent headline:
Trump struggles to say ‘evangelical’ and muddles up Israel in wild, incoherent speech at Christian event
Republican candidate arrived late to Nashville speech looking flushed and exhausted to rant about Democrats, the Department of Education, the Capitol riot and the ‘silencing’ of religious groups
NYT headline, same speech:
Trump Frames Election as Battle Against ‘Wicked’ System Bent on Attacking Christians
Speaking at a Christian media convention in Nashville, former President Donald J. Trump claimed that a “radical left, corrupt political class” was persecuting Christians.Report
The real problem is that NYT doesn’t actually know how to analyze him. Obviously 1/6 matters, as does his increasingly crazed raving. But if they really wanted to stick it to him they’d talk about his utterly failed presidency where he didn’t build the wall (much mess make Mexico pay for it), let American cities be torched by opportunistic criminals and ideological psychopaths for months without doing anything, failed to bring the factories back, and claimed a vaccine his administration financed and procured would stop covid in its tracks when all it does is prevent the person that takes it from dying.Report
Forget about “sticking it to him”, they aren’t even willing to present their readers with the simple basic truth.
Even if all they did was transcribe his speeches verbatim, it would be an improvement by showing people how truly deranged he is.
Instead they clean up his ramblings and fashion them into phrases that make him seem like a normal person.Report
It’s funny you mention that, I kind of wish they would publish them. Maybe they exist in expressly conservative/MAGA outlets but my guess is that you’re right, that the picking and choosing of coherent thoughts or phrases by legacy media is misleading about how out there some of it seems to be. I recall reading that W. Bush reacted to hearing his inauguration American carnage speech by saying ‘that was some weird sh*t’.Report
That’s a very important point. Conceptually speaking, it’s the last piece in the puzzle to explain why Trump and the GOP have won the last six months or so politically.
Basically, just very recently, maybe within the last 1-3 years, we’ve begun to see a reversal of 100+ years of wage trends. Ie, due to AI, Trump, interest rates, nationalism and maybe a couple other things, we’ve seen absolute _and relative_ wage increases to blue-collar, less educated, meat space labor at the expense of more educated, white collar, idea space/symbol manipulators.
This is really hitting the low-wage-but-educated part of the workforce especially hard: editorial assistants, nontenured college faculty, document review lawyers, nonunion state or municipal employees, etc. It’s very dispiriting for them to get up in the morning and watch themselves be comprehensively outearned by swimming pool maintenance contractors.
What’s worse, their jobs are coming under increased pressure and need political protection, and Biden isn’t giving it to them. Therefore, they are not especially motivated to go to bat for the Democratic Party as it is presently constituted, without holding a single positive thought for Team Red.
I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be that way in November, but it’s working in the Republicans favor for now.Report
“He isn’t Donald Trump” was literally the only argument anyone ever had for Biden.
(Well…except for the thing where black people liked it that he was the white guy who’d been the Stepin Fetchit for a black man, but that’s probably not something we feel comfortable about looking into very deeply so we’ll just pretend it didn’t exist.)Report
When your WAR is negative, even a replacement level player is better.Report
Nonsense. “He isn’t DJT” is the only argument anyone needed.Report