Joe Biden has passed a lot of significant legislation, but he's also developed a reputation for "small ball" initiatives: minor rules that attack everyday annoyances. Here's a non-exhaustive sampling:
- Hearing aids. Allows low-cost hearing aids to be purchased without a prescription.
- Insulin. Limits the cost of insulin to $35 per month for people on Medicare and for most people with private insurance.
- Junk fees. Widespread efforts to rein in the hidden fees charged by banks, airlines, hotels and hundreds of other industries.
- Overtime. Makes overtime pay mandatory for salaried workers earning up to $58,000. Affects about 4 million workers.
- Robocalls. New rule cuts down on illegal overseas robocalls.
- Surprise health care billing. Bans hospitals from charging huge fees for out-of-network specialists.
- Late fees. Cuts the typical credit card late payment fee from $32 to $8.
- Airline refunds. Requires airlines to automatically make refunds if flights are delayed or canceled.
- Noncompetes. Bans employers from requiring noncompete agreements when they hire workers.
- "Click to cancel." Proposed rule that makes it as easy to cancel an online service as it is to sign up.
- Ticket fees up front. Requires ticket sellers to disclose all fees up front, not late in the purchase process.
Question: has any of this done Biden any good politically? It seems like it should, at least a little bit, but I doubt it. Too many of these things are invisible (who notices when you don't get a surprise bill from your hospital or you don't get a spam call?) and the others don't get enough promotion for anyone to credit Biden. The hearing aid thing, for example, ought to be a pretty big deal for a lot of people, but who even remembers it? If you buy a great hearing aid for $500 at Costco, does anyone think about Biden when they pay the bill?
Not sure I agree. I've been stuck in middle mgmt positions where I could not fix the big things that everyone had to deal with daily. But I could target and fix tons of little everyday annoyances, so that's what I did. People told me it made the rest bearable. They noticed and liked it when shite went away.
While I do a similar experience in my career. .....I also felt that the higher I rose and the larger my sphere of influence on the Org Chart, my direct impact was lessened and it became less common to get attaboys from the team.
I would imagine that the President suffers an extreme version of this.
I am also grateful that the media didn't rely on my decisions to generate clicks and views. If the Drudge Report had focused on every cost cutting decision, and time I forgot somones name.....it probably would have been a very different career.
No one cares. These are all completely irrelevant to my life, but I’m already voting for him. The whole Democratic Party agenda is entirely useless. Republicans are the enemy. Beat them. Heck, destroy them before they do you. People just don’t see the threat. Or maybe I’m overreacting. I guess we’ll find out. Good luck.
That's wrong. Okay, not YOUR feelings. But in this case, it's the news media that doesn't care. They don't give a rip for what Kevin calls "small ball"; they reserve their reporting for The Big Stories. Like
* Was Trump's grimace angrier today than yesterday?
* Tennies with a suit! Unthinkable!! (ignoring all the career women who have done this for decades)
* Who declined to attend Joe's White House seder
* Quick! follow that motorcade! Trump is going to court today, just as he has for weeks now! Gotta follow every last minute!
See? The infotainment media only covers The Important Stuff, the News of Historical Import. Quietly saving consumers from outrageous overages and junk fees that were even more quietly tacked on over the decades, to great profit ? Why would anybody in the top 0.5% care?
When things operate as they should, people treat that as normal. If you tell people Biden did that, their main response will be "it's about time". And Republicans will insist they wanted this outcome too--but Biden got there the wrong way....
Most of those will make pretty good ads alongside the ones asking "Do you want to Brett Kavenaugh to control your body?"
+1
That's right. Biden's got plenty of money for ads, and plenty of content like this. Plus an opponent who continually advertises against himself with many voters.
Now let's help the Democrats keep the Senate.
Now that you mention it, I do get fewer spam calls. Thanks, Joe!
👍👍👍👍👍
I wonder if I'll be able to retire my call blocker. We were getting multiple calls a day. It came pre-loaded with a lot of already known bad numbers, and has a nice, satisfying "big red button" to whap when you see a call you don't recognize, and get the tell-tale clicking of a robo-call chain looking for an open operator line. Hit the button and they get on the list where the number/name displays but you only get one ring before it blocks.
If I actually get a real person right away and don't want another call I check the CID on my phone, make a note, and hit the block button without picking up the call.
People really don't notice much on their own these days, not after 8 or 9 years of concentrated conditioning in bombast and fantasy from the focal point of media coverage. They didn't notice much before then either, but it's gotten much, much worse.
Biden's people need to figure out how to tout things like these continually and without making him look like a trump wannabe. Maybe 5 or 10-second spots along the lines Boronx mentions-- insulin Joe, then closing with a couple seconds of an ob-gyn exam room that has a big-brother portrait of Alito glaring at the interaction (I might have him dressed as Q from Star Trek TNG, but that's just me). Short messages with lots of repetition, spotlighting a good thing Joe's done contrasted against a fearful thing MAGA will mean. They need to think outside the bun, as Taco Bell used to say.
For some bizarre reasons neither the press nor the Dems themselves have given Joe kudos for anything that he has done. It’s like he doesn’t exist and t-Rump is on the front page daily. Free politics for t-Rump. It’s pathetic. Even when t-Rump or the family are scamming the public, they make the front page.
Why aren’t Dems shouting out all the good things that Joe has done?
Has anyone bought Melanoma,s overpriced necklace for a Mother’s Day gift yet…
Question: has any of this done Biden any good politically?
Answer: it depends on how you define politically good versus politically bad.
Politically good: Serving the long-term interest of the group at the short-term expense of within-group subjects so the subjects benefit in the long term due to the group's strength.
Politically bad: Serving the short-term interest of a within-group subject at the group's expense so within-group subjects suffer in the long term due to the group's weakness.
Has any of this done Biden any good politically? Yes.
For the sake of completeness, an alternative definition of politically good is convincing people to vote for you, in which case:
Has any of this done Biden any good politically? Apparently not as much as being a criminal sociopath.
Let's hope that the Biden campaign can get these items out in the public space, because unless he does, people will only hear about protesting students at Columbia or whatever else the flavor of the day is. As I recall Clinton had a similar record in some ways and made some hay on that.
But even if he does not get credit, he HAS made this country a better place to live with this kind of thing and once again has my thanks. Weird as it sounds, he may well be my favorite president of my life.
I read about 7 of the 11 "small ball" initiatives. Some of those are NOT at all small. Requiring overtime for 4M lower echelon salaried employees? That's a "big f%#king deal"! So are all the fees that quietly siphon money out of the pockets of the people who are most vulnerable.
Few people care about policies or outcomes. Its all about the tribe and the struggle at hand.
This is what Democrats always do. Quietly make things better for ordinary people. It's a wonder the party still manages to exist.
Stopping illegal overseas robocalls is pretty hard to notice when your phone is getting flooded with illegal domestic robocalls.