The New York Times writes today about Black farmers who are upset that they've seen few results from programs designed to help them:
The promise of the debt relief program was dashed after groups representing white farmers filed lawsuits to block it, arguing that the federal government was engaging in reverse discrimination by awarding money based on race. The lawsuits were initiated by America First Legal, an organization led by Stephen Miller, a former top Trump administration official.
....The fund for farmers who have faced discrimination, which could include any ethnic group, has yet to pay out anything. The U.S.D.A. has employed outside firms to vet more than 60,000 applications. The money is expected to start flowing in August.
....The lack of progress has convinced Mr. Boyd that he cannot support Mr. Biden’s re-election bid. While he did not say that he was ready to back Mr. Trump, he suggested that the Trump administration had worked harder to help white farmers than Mr. Biden had for Black farmers.
This has gotten pathological. Students won't support Biden because Republicans killed college loan relief. Palestine supporters won't support Biden even though everyone knows Trump would be worse for their cause. Black farmers are angry at Biden because MAGA racists scuttled debt relief. Climate change hawks are mad because they've never heard of IRA. Immigration worriers think Biden is doing nothing because Republicans cynically stopped immigration reform. And voters in general are skeptical of Democrats because of debt ceiling and budget chaos caused by Republicans.
Has there ever been a president in history who's gotten less credit for his accomplishments than Joe Biden? It's one thing to be disappointed in a president who doesn't fulfill campaign promises, but it's crazy to be mad at one who has, even if Trump acolytes in the media and the Supreme Court have killed some of them. Their success in demonizing Biden has been nothing short of a master class.
The NYTimes is feuding with Biden.
This story makes it sound like found someone who would say this nonsense and ran a story just to say, "see what happens when you mess with us!"
This is a garbage story.
another reason i recently cancelled my subscription.
This is 95% the fault of the media for convincing all Americans, for decades now, that the president controls everything and, consequently, everything bad that happens is the fault of the president. This is the success of their vaunted "holding leaders accountable" principle.
The other 5% is due to presidential candidates reinforcing this fallacy by declaring "If elected, I am going to this, and I am going to do that, and I am going to do everything . . . on DAY ONE!"
They also keep implying there exists somewhere people who are “perfect” candidates — by saying that candidates may not be perfect but…… You don’t say that about a characteristics that doesn’t exist in anyone but our adolescent political media clealry thinks the perfect politician exists somewhere. I suspect a lot of them believe JFK was one and are longing for another Camelot president they can fall in love with.
This is really nothing new. When people are happy/unhappy about something it's the current administration that gets the credit/blame, regardless of who is actually responsible. And no matter how good things are, people are always kvetching about something. R's know this. This is why they tried to block EVERYTHING that Obama tried to do. However...
This is what campaigns are about - reminding people of what has actually been accomplished. Polls in June are meaningless. If you don't believe me, just ack President Dukakis.
The Duke was up in the polls for a brief period following the Democratic convention in 1988. OTOH, Biden has been struggling in the polls consistently all along. So I'm a lot less optimistic than you are.
this is the insanity of our madisonian political system. most people are ill-informed, overwhelmed by other matters, or just plain idiotic. they expect that the office of president of the united states functions like a wizard-king who waves a magic wand to make good on his campaign promises, and their idea of what their representatives and senators do is...hazy at best.
in the face of *that*, it's almost amazing that it's taken the country's nihilist/fascist faction as long as they have to realize that they can bring the country to the brink just by relentlessly obstructing everything, no matter how popular it is. half the country will still blame Democrats for not magically getting things done!
Don't blame Madison.
The system as designed and initially implemented was a REPUBLIC, with multiple elements in place to deal with the issues you describe, including
- state legislators choose senators
- conventions making decision, not primaries
- an Electoral College with teeth.
Over the past 120 years or so each of these elements (and others) has been removed (with Electoral College already toothless, but people want to go further and totally remove it), always in the name of "more democracy".
The founders were wise enough to know that the goal is *some* democracy, not total democracy...
that's the whole problem being described here, you numbnuts
+1
I'd be curious to know what you think "Electoral College with teeth" means, but I have a feeling that I can come up with a more coherent answer myself after just seeing the phrase 30 seconds ago.
He means white guys pick the President.
All those things made the problem *worse*, not better, by making the lines of accountability even less clear.
Parliamentary systems like the one Great Britain has are better because the line of accountability is clear: the voters elect a Parliament, the Parliament picks the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister governs the country. The PM always has a legislative majority at his back, so if he doesn't fulfill his campaign promises, he and his party are to blame. If you don't like the PM you vote his party out, it's that simple.
Helps when much of the MSM is broadcasting your spin (because they want TFG to win so they have more chaos to write about)
The GQP has been at this strategy for decades now, and are really good at framing and working the infotainment media. The media seems to enjoy being worked. It beats doing it themselves!
But how did we get there? Pushback. Constant pushback, at all levels. Unfair pushback, blatant lies about "slanted" coverage (if it wasn't slanted the right way), calls, letters, emails, sponsors putting their "feet" down.
The left could do something similar, but the left isn't all on the same page and doesn't take "orders."
Biden could do something similar. But he has a messaging problem. Most of the facts are on his side. Employment is good, inflation has come way down. If republicans had these facts on their side, you would never hear the end of it.
Biden should be shouting and selling this non-stop. But no, he would rather spend all his time demonizing a candidate who is already a demon in the majority of people's eyes.
I guess he is saving this for closer to the election. When it may be too late. And then again, I wouldn't be surprised if he fails to sell reality even then.
An article which seems to imply this by Russell Berman in the Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/06/biden-campaign-2024-election-senate/678691/
But it is behind a paywall and I can't read it. What I can see is this:
"The Overlooked (But Real) Possibility of a Big Democratic Win
Both moderates and progressives are pushing the Biden campaign to get more ambitious.
A wide-ranging group of Democrats—including moderates running in swing districts as well as those in the party’s left wing—wants the president to emphasize the promise of his second term as much as, if not more than, the peril of Trump’s. Because Biden focuses so much on the threat Trump poses to democracy and the rule of law, they think Biden risks losing voters who want to see tangible improvements in their lives."
Biden is a great Senator.
You forgot about all the people mad at Biden for the end of Roe!
Not sure there's a complete answer, but we have to loudly and clearly and unambiguously blame everything on Trump. Skip the nuance. The economy, for example, was a disaster under him. No, I don't care that well acktually there was a pandemic. He was the president and he gets the blame. For all of it. Those are the rules now.
Kevin, these are tired old Democrat talking points. And mostly not true. "Students won't support Biden because Republicans killed college loan relief." I doubt that's it. "Palestine supporters won't support Biden even though everyone knows Trump would be worse for their cause." True, but it's because the lesser of two evils argument doesn't work when both candidates are fine with killing children. "Black farmers are angry at Biden because MAGA racists scuttled debt relief." I doubt that's it. I think, rather, Blacks rewarded Biden in 2020 because of Obama and he's on his own now. "Climate change hawks are mad because they've never heard of IRA." They haven't? Did you ask them? I think almost all of them heard of IRA but also know US oil production hit an all-time high in 2023. "Immigration worriers think Biden is doing nothing because Republicans cynically stopped immigration reform." No, it's because the media reports more on words than on deeds and the GOP has the advantage there.
Meanwhile, swing state polls on Senate candidates seem to favor Dems by quite a big margin, meaning they are not the problem. Biden is. Call that unfair if you like but he is the problem. Or his age is.
It's not unfair. Biden should have had the good sense to not run this time.
In the last two Presidential elections, Trump considerably overperformed his polls. If that happens this time, it will be a Republican trifecta.
I question that Biden is the problem. There were early polls that pitched other Democrats against Trump. I don't recall seeing any that showed Newsom or Whitmer or any other doing significantly better than Biden. In 2020, Biden outlasted a good-sized field of candidates through the primary and caucus season, and defeated Trump by 7 million votes and a convincing EC margin.
I have been thinking that Biden should be running as much against the do-nothing Republicans in Congress as against TFG, but there is a large group of voters who think they are fine with a do-nothing government -- the GOP has been telling them for 40+ years that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem".
I question that Biden is the problem.
You're right to do so. Every leader of a major democracy has serious approval problems right now, nearly all of the are less popular than Joe. Check our the numbers for Trudeau, Sunak, Macron and the German Chancellor (name escapes me).
"Call that unfair if you like but he is the problem. Or his age is."
So in response the voters will turn to the 78-year old convicted felon. Okay...
The majority of voters do not choose a candidate for rational reasons. Okay... ?
We need strategies to win, not to die on the moral high ground.
For those of you who think nobody would ever willingly vote for a convicted felon:
Remember the Louisiana gubernatorial election of 1991, which pitted Edwin Edwards against David Duke. Remember the saying: "Vote for the crook. It's important." That was a pretty popular sentiment amongst Dems, as I recall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Louisiana_gubernatorial_election
I am sure there are many Repubs who feel that way about Biden -- that he must be voted out of office regardless. You and I may not agree but that's something to be considered.
"Has there ever been a president in history who's gotten less credit for his accomplishments than Joe Biden?"
Jimmy Carter
+10 and thank you for that one.
Accomplishments, bah! We're Americans, we want to be entertained. So we voted for a second-rate actor and a fifth-rate 'reality'-show stiff.
FWIW black farmers and wanna-be farmers got approximately 2 billion dollars from the Pigford lawsuits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigford_v._Glickman
Since it was a lawsuit the legalities are a bit different than the legislated programs.
What if I told you that Mr. Boyd was not going to vote for Joe Biden to begin with?
I have no doubt that when Trump creates his deportation army and concentration camps to deport his 15 million “undesirables” and students who protest are amongst them that they will blame Biden. And those “liberals” who don’t vote for Biden will also blame Biden for failing to beat Trump even though they told him how easy it would be but he failed to listen. Or he failed to drop out because he was too old. Or “earn” their vote by doing something they thought he should do.
Sorry, if Biden loses it will be the fault of those people who failed to vote for him. They will be the ones responsible for the horror to come.
Whoops, now JD Vance is bragging they will deport 20 million people:
“Not having 20 million illegal aliens who need to be housed (often at public expense) will absolutely make housing more affordable for American citizens.”
"...Immigration worriers think Biden is doing nothing because Republicans cynically stopped immigration reform. ..."
There is plenty Biden could do unilaterally on immigration. Like when he took office and removed a bunch of restrictions Trump had put in place.
As ever . . .
"According to Brendan Nyhan, the Dartmouth political scientist who coined the term, the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency is "the belief that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics." In other words, the American president is functionally all-powerful, and whenever he can't get something done, it's because he's not trying hard enough, or not trying smart enough."
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5732208/the-green-lantern-theory-of-the-presidency-explained
I mean, look at President Bartlett!
When they try to tell you MAGA isn't a cult, ask them to explain this,
https://x.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1802488326005440741
Steve Bannon is a horrible human being, but "flood the zone with shit" was a brilliant strategy. If you're a casual news reader, you're hit with so much crap, most of it about politicians and pundits being angry or negative about something, that the temptation to ignore the whole lot must be overwhelming. Voting, if done at all, would be done on the basis of vague impressions such as "at least Trump fights" or "Biden is a vegetable, nobody knows who's really in charge".
I have often seen it asserted that the American left was fortunate that Bush won reelection in 2004, because the negative effects of Bush's bad choices in his first term didn't become apparent until his second, and John Kerry would have been stuck holding the bag for Bush's mistakes if he'd won.
Joe Biden is arguably in the same bind that Kerry avoided: holding the bag and getting blamed for stuff that was actually his predecessor's fault. Some of it is global too, such as the inflation spike. Incumbents have been doing very poorly in elections this year all over the world. I suppose we just have to cross our fingers and hope that things get better before Election Day.
Nevertheless, I wouldn't say that Trump winning reelection would have been a good thing. Trump is a wannabe dictator who poses an existential risk to the Republic that Bush never did.
bush himself was not going to attempt to become a dictator, but it's a mistake to underestimate how dangerous he was to democracy in the US. he basically was an extremely willing accelerant of all of the worst anti-democratic trends that were already underway in the republican party and the US conservative movement:
-he owed his entire presidency to judicial hackery, and only heightened the number of pure republican political hacks on the bench
-eliminationism, making it clear that his position was that the opposition was ipso facto illegitimate as a governing party
-xenophobia/racism, de facto declaring that some americans were genuinely less american than others (against muslims more so than anyone else, but it wasn't confined to muslims)