Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year’s presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election – despite negative poll indications, White House sources have said.
The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garland as attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection while presiding over a justice department that aggressively prosecuted Biden’s son Hunter.
With just more than three weeks of his single-term presidency remaining, Biden’s reported rueful reflections are revealed in a Washington Post profile that contains the clearest signs yet that he thinks he erred in withdrawing his candidacy in July after a woeful debate performance against his rival for the White House, Trump, the previous month.
You can go back and look at Pew polling or Gallup polling. The top concern for people who voted Trump was the economy. Within that, the aspect that they were most concerned about was prices. That is, people were very unhappy about inflation. There was a lot of inflation relative to normal US levels under Biden.
The Trump administration also adopted inflationary policy. And doing so was generally considered desirable by economists; having inflation is preferable to recession in terms of the impact on a country, and COVID-19 was going to produce some level of economic disruption. But that doesn’t change the fact that the public doesn’t view inflation in that way; it’s very unpopular with the public, and past polling has shown that the public, in the US and elsewhere, is more upset about having inflation than a recession.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c8881/c8881.pdf
The results show that most people in all countries would choose low inflation even if it meant that millions more people would be unemployed.
In general, the American public also attributes short-term aspects of the economy directly to the President.
The Trump campaign also worked to drive those concerns and associate them with the Biden administration.
Benefitting from mis-attribution of economic behavior and policy is not unique to the Republicans. Clinton benefited from it; the “it’s the economy, stupid” slogan played off public concern about economic policy where there probably wasn’t much to blame Bush for, but the public was still upset about it. To some extent, it winds up being luck of the draw; if the economy is growing when you’re President, people tend to credit you for it, whether you really deserve credit or not, and if it’s contracting, people tend to blame you for it, again whether you really deserve blame or not. They don’t go digging through data or reading much about where policy originated.
That’s been a property of American elections for some time.
If you want to change that, you have a hard communications problem.
My guess is that neither Biden nor Harris was going to solve that communication problem, fundamentally change that aspect of electoral politics, and I think that unless they managed to pull some very large rabbit out of the hat, that was going to dominate the election.
Technically, Inflation peaked in Biden’s first year. That means it rose under Trump and declined under Biden. I’m sure people really did think what you said, but I think it needs to be clarified that the economy actually did improve, from how it was in the Covid 2020 Era, after Biden took office.
No Democrat will in our lifetime. It’s to late for that. The wealthy own all major social media outlets, all major traditional media outlets, and are turning them to disinformation and AI slop. Even as they spin up thousands of AI slop and misinformation farms masquerading as small independent outlets to keep the fools that stray corralled.
Liberal or economic liberal politics will never solve it either. As this is a feature of them. It’s working as intended, in the interests of the worst possible people.
To me, there are a couple problems of perception that gave Biden/Harris a huge uphill battle in the election that they didn’t need to have.
Biden actually did a ton to address problems of inequality and income in America. He worked harder on it than any president since Johnson at least, and scored some huge successes driving up low-income wages and strengthening unions. But, he didn’t do it in ways that were visible to the average American, I think because he’s so far removed from the present-day average American that he genuinely didn’t realize how invisible a lot of his reforms would turn out to be.
His two huge mistakes were:
- Talking about, and letting people in his adminstration talk about, inflation, in terms of “how much have prices gone up this year?” He bragged about getting inflation back down, which speaking from an economist’s point of view is accurate. But things are still expensive. To the average American, “getting inflation back down” would have meant that eggs go back down to costing what they used to cost. He could have gotten away with half as much gains on wages, but taking strong action to bring down grocery prices and rent prices. People respond to how much stuff costs, even if they’re making 20% more than they used to a year before.
- Focusing all his wage efforts on people who are in the “W-2 economy,” even at a low level. The biggest economic victims in the country are undocumented people, people driving Uber, people working at Wal-mart being kept just barely under full-time employment, all of whose rent goes up every year to match anything they’re gaining. People are being squeezed out of the full-time-job-having economy steadily more and more every year and into the desperation economy. I know he did the Climate Corps, but something more like the CCC or WPA, giving real full-time working jobs that can pay a decent income on a massive scale, would have been better than looking out for people who already have a W-2 union job having their union more effectively able to fight for them.
And then, also, letting Merrick Garland twiddle his thumbs for four years like the cowardly lump that he is. I think history will look back on this past few years of slow-walking the Trump prosecutions as a massive error that led to untold misery and bloodshed. Honestly, even if he fucked up everything else and lost the 2024 election, if he had simply taken the fire on the roof as an urgent problem that needs all hands on deck, instead of one more renovation project that needs to wait its turn until it comes up in the agenda, it would have been better.
Garland is easily this day and age’s Chamberlain. Except Chamberlain sacrificed the Sudetenland to buy time for rearmament, what’s Garland’s excuse?
Yeah. Chamberlain came in with effectively no military at all, saw that a war with Germany would be like a child trying to fight an adult, oversaw a lot of rearmament, and then declared war on Germany when the situation became more clear, at a point when they still barely had a functional military. He gets a lot of heat for appeasement but the situation he came into was totally hopeless, and he was taking concrete steps to get things moved in the right direction.
Biden and Garland did fuck-all for 4 years, and then when the situation started showing signs of genuine threat, started talking about pardons for them and their friends as the solution.
Focusing all his wage efforts on people who are in the “W-2 economy,” even at a low level.
Do people not in the W-2 economy turn out to vote? (Undocumented people clearly don’t.) This isn’t a rhetorical question.
Edit: a quick search found this from 2016, but it would need to adjusted by the number of people in each segment. (And “W-2 economy” isn’t synonymous with income, but they are correlated.)
Now how do those income blocks compare as proportions of the total voting-eligible population?
If people not in the W-2 economy had gotten jobs working in the modern-day WPA, paying $75k a year, they sure as fuck would have started turning out to vote. Probably forever, as long as it kept going. There’s a reason FDR won 4 terms.
That’s okay Joe, there is a lot of regret about your entire administration, and career, on all sides.
The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garlandas attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection
At least that part is fair
It’s been absolutely appalling how long it has taken to prosecute Trump.
Many cases should have been ready the second he was no-longer president.
All the lame considerations about looks and not getting involved is idiotic. if the politicians in power don’t work to defend democracy, who else should?
The left have been screaming for Democrats to wake up for more than a decade, but they behave like a party with dementia that doesn’t understand what’s going on around them.
As AOC has stated multiple times, people will come to vote for you, if you give them a good enough reason for it. Harris was the better more moderate candidate. But I think most Americans want more, they want real change. Like better healthcare, environment protection, democracy etc.
Preventing a fascist narcissist becoming president apparently wasn’t enough?!But maybe I’m wrong, maybe the majority of Americans prefer to live with the danger of not receiving healthcare, and the danger of being financially ruined by healthcare bills. Rather than living in a “socialist hellhole” where society actually care about the citizens?
The number one cause for bankruptcies in USA is healthcare bills.
Remember how there was already a document produced by a special prosecutor that said there were crimes committed but a sitting president couldn’t be prosecuted? Just fucking memory holed by Garland’s DOJ. He literally could have taken that up the day he was confirmed.
So it’s everybody else’s fault.
said he made a mistake
He literally said it was his.
No, he literally said his mistake was selecting Garland. There were many other mistakes, and opportunities for him to push Garland even after he had been selected.
That’s the taking responsibility equivalent of “I’m sorry you feel that way” apology.
No, he wouldn’t have.
I agree.
They would have kept showing that first debate performance over and over as a reason Joe is too old, and it would have worked.
I agree, but it deserves more discussion than just “No.”
Eh, does it? The whole reason he was pushed out was because he was a combination of personally incoherent and organizationally sheltered from reality. His opinion on his own greatness has little value.
I mean he already had, and if he had capitalized on how a LOSER was going to try and LOSE again because he was a huge loser I think he might have swayed many of the minds
But of course he would think that. 🙄🙄
I mean he might have, a lot of people that voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Kamala in 2024 for various reasons. Trump did only very slightly better in 2024 than be did in 2020. Would the people who stayed home and didn’t vote for Kamala have gotten out and voted for Biden? Maybe. If anything though Biden should have dropped out sooner or not ran at all, the DNC should have fielded better candidates, instead they spent 4 years (longer) trying to strangle any progressives before they could become feasible candidates.
I mean he might have
No. “We finally beat Medicaid” Biden would have lost, bigly.
If anything though Biden should have dropped out sooner or not ran at all
Yes, 100% this. He should have been the transitional president he signaled he’d be, before being elected in 2020.
I actually think that Biden won the election because of the primary campaign against Bernie. Bernie shifted the platform left and attracted young voters to the party that subsequently voted for Biden in the general election (even if they had to hold their noses). Nothing like a primary to unite voters behind the candidate.
The Joe Biden who showed up in 2020 would have beaten Trump. Joe Biden in 2024 is not the same guy.
The only real asset Joe had over Kamala, though, is a penis. For some voters, though, that’s enough to make them pick one and not the other.
A white penis.
Well that’s disturbing image I can’t get out of my head, lost circulation or just old?
One of the Republican talking points was that Kamala never won a primary and just snuck in. Not that it mattered for her actual policies but more so it was another reason for votor apathy
For some voters, though, that’s enough to make them pick one and not the other.
Those voters would’ve picked Trump over Biden anyway. The Democrats will never, ever win by falling over themselves to court those types of voters at the expense of progressives and leftists.
But Liz Cheney supported Kamala…
Look at all these Republicans who say, “Don’t vote for Trump.”
Surely that’ll work…
His own internal polling had trump winning over 400 versus him
A lot of people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 spent the next four years getting poorer.
Kamala lost because she promised to be four more years of the same thing.
Okay grampa, back to bed.
This ghoul was propped up in 2020 with the full force of the party and then won thanks to covid, but he thinks he’s some hero. Democrats lost in 2024 in large part thanks to him. Fuck you biden, you racist, genocidal, and power-hungry piece of shit.
Things would have likely gone a lot better if the Ds would have had an actual primary. It’s so frustrating.
A fool to the end. A Zionist, genociding, hubristic fool until the end.
“Benedict Arnold” developed a clear connotation over time. The same needs to become true for “Merrick Garland”. History will remember him as a coward beyond measure and a key to enabling trump’s final push to end American democracy.
Fuck Merrick Garland, without exception.
He spent so much time trying to make a good legacy that he forgot to actually do the right thing in the moment.
Garland knew he’d be accused of bias and selective prosecution, so Garland took slow and deliberate steps to make an ironclad case… only to be accused of bias anyway, and doing it so slowly that the charges expired.
Garland was hired to slow walk the case so Biden could run as second worst to Trump again.
What would have made him a good Supreme Court Justice made him a HORRIBLE attorney general.
His tenure was so horribly handled though, that I can’t help but suspect some actual intent… Otherwise, Im I’m left to conclude that he was just that impotent and cowardly. There’s no way he was that lost on what this moment was - He had an unquestionable historical mandate to act against an insurrection at the US Capitol, with police officers being beaten and stabbed with US flags on sharpened poles, all broadcast live across every channel, in full HD. He is a failure on an unimaginable scale that spans all recorded time and space. He’s a fucking dunce.
And fuck Biden for picking a Republican as AG.
Garland made a lot of sense in theory. Obama had picked him first and he had been denied his likely singular life’s goal by obstructionist gop with trump egging it on. He should have sought justice for this country, while feeling the cathartic release of righting his personal wrongs.
But he didn’t, because he’s feckless and an absolute waste of that historical moment.
He probably had a better chance than Harris. Might not have won either way, but sadly I suspect the odds were better with him.
Not after that debate performance.
He also wasnt campaigning very much at all. It was all naptimes, no speeches after 6pm, and using surrogates.
Yeah there was a huge stink on him. It wasn’t just the debate. His every appearance and utterance just made him look geriatric. The debate just made it so obvious he was indefensible.
It’s possible. I thought hardcore misogyny was on a downward trend but fuck was I wrong
Anything to avoid admitting that Harris lost because the only way she differentiated herself from Biden was moving to his right.
I honestly don’t think people care that much about a woman running. Because at that level, their gender is not ‘man’ or ‘woman’ but ‘politician’.
People didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she was quite unlikeable and the campaign centred around it being ‘her turn’. People didn’t vote for Harris because she was generally invisible and had to run a very truncated campaign. The fact that both were women was the least of their worries.
Other countries have elected women leaders with no issues. Heck, you see women presidents all the time in movies and TV shows. Nobody bats an eye.
I guess. Except America hasn’t had a woman president.
You’ll get there eventually; we can’t all be as progressive :D
Might’ve, might not’ve. It’s irrelevant now, of course.
What Biden and Harris will be remembered most for, is their peaceful transition of power to a mentally unbalanced fascist tyrant, knowingly, compliantly, without even any public statements of caution.
Biden and Harris are ready to quietly shake hands with Trump and Pence, hand them control of everything, after then retire to a quiet life of luxury and highly-paid speaking engagements, where they’ll continue the Democratic Party’s proud tradition of speaking without really saying anything.
And so the toilet flushes.
There’s nothing wrong with peacefully handing over power to a person that won both the electoral and popular votes this time around.
We get what we fuckin’ deserve.
Without even any public statements of caution.
They’d both been making public statements of caution for months prior to the election. People didn’t listen, so now we’re here. Biden and Harris are not responsible for this. We are.
Was this truly “the last chance to save democracy” or just another election?
The campaign certainly ran and fundraised off the former messaging, but behaved like the latter.
People (including campaigning politicians) can genuinely believe democracy is on the line but refuse to be the one that ends it by refusing to give up power themselves when they fairly lose to their opponent. There is absolutely nothing wrong or illogical about that. If Trump refuses to leave office in four years it will be him ending democracy in the U.S. even though he got there by democratic means. This is usually how dictators get into power; a dumb, frightened populace hands it to them.
The campaign is bigger than one person, as is the party structure though - Pelosi had to be the one to kick out the pillars beneath Biden in order for him to end his run. Nobody in the DNC or the Biden campaign took the keys away from Grandpa until then. Even as an DC outsider who just follows politics, let alone has daily access to Biden, it was apparent that he was mentally declining, and rapidly so in the last two years.
Even before then, it was business as usual. “It’s my turn” got us Trump in 2016 after Hillary stood aside for Obama. “It’s my turn, again” got us Trump in 2024 because Biden/the staff did not court a fresh crop of junior politicians, nor stand aside gracefully in the Primary, nor even permit Harris the conditions to win. She publicly was saddled with no-win scenarios like the border or Gaza, whilst being relied upon to pass legislation in the Senate, becoming the record holder in that role.
And that’s before we even get to how Trump’s court shenanigans were permitted to play out and run down the clock. Biden needs to save his whitewashing of history and self-exoneration for his Presidential Library, his record is clear. Had he actually been a one termed ‘elder statesman’ who passed the torch and prepared the next generation, we wouldn’t be looking at a Republican triple sweep of government.
Just a small correction … Trump’s VP is JD Vance this time, not Pence.
Not like it really matters, Trump seems to be VP to Musk now.
I forgot … the next step of late-stage capitalism is to have a billionaire act as proxy for the duly-elected POTUS.
:/
I’m old, sorry, but yeah — gotta remember, Pence wasn’t crazy enough to make the cut this time.
their peaceful transition of power to a mentally unbalanced fascist tyrant
They can either hand over control to someone who might destroy American democracy, or they can destroy American democracy themselves.
Fuck’s sake. As deluded as he was when he stayed in despite internal polling showing him losing in a landslide. Fuckwad very well may have handed American democracy over to its execution.
deleted by creator
There was some discussion I saw that alleged those polls never reached him. Instead ended at the inner staffers.
Not excusing his current opinion.
The statistics and composite polls predicted the Trump victory, and they predicted it even before Biden dropped out by a larger margin, so he is incorrect.
But, given how people chose Trump over Kamala, I can’t blame him for thinking that way. Clearly the USA does have reservations about electing a women and a minority.
Oh no he doesn’t get to say anything about it. He shit the bed, and his team shit the bed. Then when they were staring at polls showing Trump would take 400 electoral college votes they doubled down. They didn’t start a hand off in the background like everyone assumed. No they wasted nearly a month and then called up Kamala Harris one day and told her she was the candidate now, with no warning.
If anyone is responsible for Trump winning it is Biden and his team. They hid how bad Biden was aging instead of getting a ton of grown-up points by having him retire or get removed by the 25th amendment. That would have given Kamala Harris a year or two of time in office to get the incumbent advantage and set up a real campaign. No they played this like little boys who don’t want to come home because then the party ends.
Yeah except he disappeared ages ago.
Man this dude is off his rocker.
