Why It’s Hard to Explain Joe Biden’s Unpopularity

return2ozma@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – -42 points –
Opinion | Why It’s Hard to Explain Joe Biden’s Unpopularity
nytimes.com
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Wow. The NYT will just publish an opinion piece for anything. I learned nothing from reading this

I’ve made a habit of skipping any outlet’s “Opinion” section and have been much happier for it.

Amazing. Not a single mention of Palestine.

Putting his backing of Netanyahu aside, there's a number of things he could do to up his popularity. Naming two from the top of my head, he could forgive medical debt at the federal level and federally legalize marijuana and remove it as a Schedule 1 drug.

He can only forgive debt owed to the government, and people don't generally owe the government for medical services.

This was an issue before Israel was attacked.

As far as I can tell he’s done a lot of the right things, and has been as effective as you can given the political situation. I never understood why so many people seem to have an issue

before Israel was attacked

I never understood why so many people seem to have an issue

Having framed the current conflict as having started "when Israel was attacked", it's not surprising that you don't understand why people might have an issue with Biden broadly

I believe that's the opposite of their point. They're saying he was loudly on Israel's side well before the attack.

It was an attack. There were and are hostages. Whether it was retaliatory can be a topic, but that it was an attack hasn't been in dispute.

I'm not sure it is exactly 'opposite' of their point, but Biden being largely on the side of Israel is the reason a lot of leftists have always been unsupportive of him as a president.

Like most liberals, he gives a lot of lip-service to progressive causes, but ultimately finds excuses to avoid having to really upset the current hegemony. The reason he is unpopular despite his objectively skilled politic-ing around progressive issues (i think) is because more people are seeing liberalism generally as a failed political project and want actual change rather than lip-service and half-measures.

His support of Israel is only the most pertinent example of his politics clashing violently with reality.

9 more...

It's not hard. It's easy if you see with your eyes instead of understanding the world as others would like you to.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


As The Washington Free Beacon’s Joe Simonson noted recently, just surfing around most American media and pop culture, you probably wouldn’t realize that Biden’s job approval ratings are quite so historically terrible, worse by far than Trump’s at the same point in his first term.

When Barack Obama was at his polling nadir, most observers blamed the unemployment rate and the Obamacare backlash, and when Bill Clinton struggled through his first two years, there was a clear media narrative about his lack of discipline and White House scandals.

Attempts to reduce his struggles to the inflation rate are usually met with vehement rebuttals, there’s a strong market for “bad vibes” explanations of his troubles, a lot of blame gets placed on partisan polarization even though Biden won a clear popular majority not so long ago, and even the age issue has taken center stage only in the past few months.

Some of this mystification reflects liberal media bias accentuated by contemporary conditions — an unwillingness to look closely at issues like immigration and the border, a hesitation to speak ill of a president who’s the only bulwark against Trumpism.

But in practice, this push tended to treat representation and progressive politics as a package deal, making nonwhites with moderate-to-conservative views more exotic, not less — as mystifying, in a way, as any MAGA-hat-wearing white guy in a rural diner.

But if you take that kind of constituency as a starting place, you may be able to reason your way to a clearer understanding of Biden’s troubles: by thinking about ways in which high borrowing costs for homes and cars seem especially punishing to voters trying to move up the economic ladder, for instance, or how the hold of cultural progressivism over Democratic politics might be pushing more culturally conservative minorities to the right even if wokeness has peaked in some elite settings.


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he's a shit president. you're just now allowed to say that because people jump down your throat about how donald trump is worse