"Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates once said of Biden, "I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." We can add economic and domestic policy issues and an additional decade to that list."
"Joe Biden's inner circle put on a full-court press on Saturday to try to prevent Jimmy Carter dying vindicated in the knowledge that he was not the worst president in American history. In a front-page article in the Washington Post on the lowest readership day of the week, Biden's advisers tried to shore up their future employability as much as they tried to make their soon-to-be former boss look good (Joe Biden’s lonely battle to sell his vision of American democracy - The Washington Post). My colleague Nick Arama covered some of the highlights on Saturday, as well as the preview we got on Friday.
"Let's do a quick run-through of Biden's vision.
Biden was a victim of valuing policy over style.
“I have come to the conclusion in recent days that I’m wrong about that,” the South Carolina Democrat, 84, remembers telling Biden. “The new environment that we currently live in — style seems to carry the day more than substance.”
“Your style,” he told the president, “does not lend itself well to the environment we’re currently in.”
Clyburn’s conclusion — which was shared by anxious Democrats in the months before the president ended his reelection bid — undermined Biden’s theory of presidential leadership. After Donald Trump’s ascent, Biden believed that he just needed to show Americans that traditional democracy still worked — by listening to experts, working with Republicans, passing popular policies — and voters would rally around him.
"If there was any substance to Biden, and that is a very arguable position, it was his utter contempt for half the country. He set about corrupting federal law enforcement (more on that in a moment) and enslaving the executive branch to the forces of racial division and, indeed, hatred.
Biden was too deep a thinker to be appreciated by the Lumpenproletariat.
“The president has been operating on a time horizon measured in decades, while the political cycle is measured in four years,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said in an interview.
Sullivan added that Biden’s accomplishments by their nature will take a long time to bear fruit. “How to govern at this moment to set the U.S. up for long-term success has one answer, and how to govern to deal with midterm and presidential elections in the very short term might have a different answer,” he said. “The president went with doing the things that really put America in a strong position.”
"This may be the most ludicrous item in the article and can best be viewed as Jake Sullivan interviewing for a think tank job or university faculty position." . . . Much more here...
