- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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 must log in or register to comment.
Hey as long as we are talking about regrets Joe, how about regretting going for a second term when you said you wouldn’t?
Sour grapes. There are no guarantees he would have won, and the propaganda machine would have played almost exactly the same tune it did for Harris. Eggs, israel, gas prices, too old…
People stayed home. That’s why we got trump.
Not sour grapes.
Pure fucking delusion and narcissism.
We all watched the debate. There was no coming back from that.
no. any idiots that did not vote for kamala to avoid a second trump term would likely not have voted for him. win for gaza or something.
I’d like to hear from one of those ass-hats that were protesting about Palestine outside Harris rallies.
You’re not in a position to talk down to anyone, are you. Centrists just lost every single lever of government and their reputation has never been worse. They’ve turned the democratic party into a big joke on their watch.
Every time you guys talk things just get worse. Maybe its time to sit down and take a look at where you’re at instead of talking. At the very least, your talking wont help anything, now will it.
Oh please. There’s some real pot kettle black in this comment.
Besides which, I’m not from the US, and I think the entire developed world is in a position to talk down to anyone from the US, in particular those who acted against their own interests by protesting against their best candidate, and assisting to install a dictator.
Honestly, one of us really does need to engage in some self reflection.
Oh right youre australian. I see that Australia has a center left and a center right party. Nothing but centrists huh, neat.
And you say:
the entire developed world is in a position to talk down to anyone from the US
Well that desire to “talk down to” and the fact that both parties in Australia are centrist certainly explains the tone of your comments. I’ve often decried to my friends, “But who will speak for the political tourists who want to do drive-by pearls-of-knowledge droppings???” Its a big concern thats seldom addressed. Its right up there wih, “But what do the fascists all think? How can we be truly centrist and bipartisan if we dont understand what they want?? who speaks for them? can we get them a seat next to Harris maybe? Maybe they can campaign together even!” I’m super concerned to know the details of the fascist plans so I can set my own agenda to be just to the left of theirs, as is proper. If the fascist dont tell me how to think, then I lack any guideposts at all, right. Centrism aint easy. So much strategery involved.
So you’re just here to (in your words) “talk down to” people in a system you’re not a member of at all, and you bring with you a profoundly inbred sense of centrism. So glad you’re here to school us americans with your keen insights on american culture. Read some blogs about America, did you? cool. So let me guess what your advice would be here, ‘we need a stronger sense of centrism in the US and everything will be OK’, am I right?
Sorry if I stole your thunder, mate.
This obsession with “centrism” is so tiresome.
Left, right, and centre is subjective. Any country with a two party system is going to have a centre left and centre right.
If you’re a major party in a two party system the only way possible way to attract enough votes to form government is to have policies as close as possible to your opponent whilst simultaneously differentiating yourself so as to be identified as “the best option” to any voters on your side of the political spectrum. This dynamic of political science is well established, and patently obvious to everyone but a handful of 16 year old idiots who think they’re the first generation in the history of the world to want things to be better than they are.
Your big "I see that Australia has… " reveal sadly says more about your very limited understanding of politics in your own country than it does about my perspective.
If you’re a major party in a two party system the only way possible way to attract enough votes to form government is to have policies as close as possible to your opponent whilst simultaneously differentiating yourself so as to be identified as “the best option” to any voters on your side of the political spectrum. This dynamic of political science is well established, and patently obvious to everyone but a handful of 16 year old idiots who think they’re the first generation in the history of the world to want things to be better than they are.
It’s very much not a basic tenet of politics, simply the philosophy that centrists continually push because it’s the philosophy that promotes centrists. This election was the perfect test case. Harris couldn’t be more centrist, even putting a lot of effort into courting actual Republican voters, while Trump leaned into the far right. Your naive political philosophy was soundly disproven.
Elections aren’t a static population of voters on a line, they have diverse opinions and different priorities, and elections are often won or loss on turnout from voters in the party base. Trumps turned his out, Harris didn’t. It had nothing to do with who was best able to represent the center.
If you’re a major party in a two party system the only way possible way to attract enough votes to form government is to have policies as close as possible to your opponent whilst simultaneously differentiating yourself
This is absolutely hilarious stuff, thank you.
Ah yes, hilarity. The classic resort of a child when confronted with a concept beyond their comprehension.
How dare they be against centrism’s defining policy?
I’ve taken a few weeks away from Lemmy since the election and now apparently the dems are centrist?
You have a 2 party system. Of which one is the most conservative and one is the most progressive. The more often you elect the more progressive party the more progressive both parties will become.
To suggest that both parties are too conservative is patently absurd and speaks of a complete lack of understanding of your political system.
I’ve taken a few weeks away from Lemmy since the election and now apparently the dems are centrist?
Now? They spent the past year supporting genocide. That is not and will never be a progressive policy. Don’t lie about progressives to make genocide supporters look good.
You simply don’t have much of a grasp on American politics if characterizing the Democrats as centrist seems inappropriate. Republicans haven’t been on some long term winning streak to push them right. Power’s been flipping back and forth in roughly equal proportion. Their base has just radicalized and their politicians move with them. The same people who were anti-Trump in 2016 are now MAGA cheerleaders. The party of “compassionate conservatism” (not really compassionate, but wanting to be seen as such) has turned hard right and embraces antagonistic and crude politics.
Only one party has tried to capture the center in the last decade, and they’ve lost 2/3 elections.
Well, Trump will make sure we don’t have to worry about Palestine anymore-as it will just be more Israel.
That was already the game under Biden. There was zero attempts to actually prevent annexation of Gaza. Just a lot of finger waving while they sent more shit and even US troops.
I would say “wow, the dementia is even farther along than we realized” but it’s likely the entire neoliberal faction that will be determined to come to this erroneous conclusion. They will grasp at any straw, even racist/sexist ones, in order to avoid admitting that the electorate is crying out for anti-corporate change.
What do you mean neoliberal faction?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
Neoliberals are guys like Elon Musk.
Yes, I know what neoliberalism is and yes, I really do mean that.
The dominant faction of the Democratic Party is, in fact, neoliberal. As a result, the party’s platform as a whole supports free-market capitalism, free trade, low regulations, weak worker protections, etc.
That’s why (for example) Hillary Clinton championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and why politicians like Elizabeth Warren and AOC who care about things like workers’ rights and Wall Street reform are among the minority within the party.
Neoliberals are guys like Elon Musk.
No, Neoliberals are guys like Elon Musk pretended to be before he came out as full-blown fascist.
I worry that neoliberalism may need fascism in order to be fully realized.
Thank you for literally being the first person I’ve ever seen online that actually seems to know what Warren stands for. Not exaggerating even in the slightest, either.
She could’ve been president, back when it would’ve mattered.
No you don’t. You just want a word for super evil. The TPP is not in any way, shape, or form Neoliberal. And the Democrats just finished four years of fighting tooth and nail to get more regulation of industry into place. I’m not a fan of them but this is just ridiculous.
The TPP is not in any way, shape, or form Neoliberal.
This just proves you have no clue whatsoever what neoliberalism is.
Oh dude lemmy has decided that there are no normal liberals left. It’s progressives and neoliberals. And no amount of reasoning, showing them academic materials, or engaging with the tenets of the ideologies will shift it. Neoliberals is the new “rich people I don’t like” label.
I just hope they don’t think Harris lost because she didn’t have enough time and then run her again in 2028, either without a primary or with a heavily one-sided primary like in 2016.
You know they will. They don’t care what people want.
Nah, they’ll pivot back to a white guy.
They’re going to give the nomination to Mitt Romney.
It’ll be Blinken or Shapiro.
deleted by creator
I’m not sure ol’ Mitt is corporate enough for the current democratic party
Ok, they have a backup plan. Their other pick will be someone even more well suited to appeal to Republicans. In fact, they have experience in politics and were even a minor Democratic Primary nomination contender several years back. They have appeal in the South, and they should have a solid lock on Georgia, and maybe even be able to finally turn Texas blue! And he’ll appeal well to the younger generations, as he has even run a Republican and third party presidential candidate in the past. Younger voters will love a candidate with such multi-partisan cred.
Let me introduce you to 2028 Democratic Presidential nominee David Duke!
That sounds like that may be current dem plan for future elections. Good summary
That dementia would probably won over him.
Fucking wanker. Let him eat megashitdicks.
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
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.
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.
I’d say his first mistake was choosing Garland. Biden then made a second mistake when he didn’t immediately fire Garland as soon as it became obvious that Garland wasn’t going to do his job.
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.
But of course he would think that. 🙄🙄
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
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 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.
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?
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…
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
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.
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.
Depends how senile he would be or not be. What killed him was the debate, if there was another one and he was fully fine, then yeah a decent chance.
What a prick. No ownership of his candidacy-destroying debate performance. And thanks for taking so long to withdraw after you fucked that to the moon. Let him be the basis for age ceilings on presidential candidates.
He’s a prick because he doesn’t want Trump to be president? He’s a prick because he wishes he did things differently?
I guess I’m a prick too then. I also don’t want Trump to be president and have regrets in my life.
He’s a prick because he thinks he should have been the one to defeat Trump. Even though he was not remotely suited to the task.
The only reason he ran at all is that he originally thought he had the best chance of winning. The debate and pressure after that changed his mind, but absolutely may have been wrong. After all, there were people on election day googling “did biden drop out?” One can certainly question how much the debate would have mattered.
But in the end, I generally agree with the below comment, that the election was always going to come down to the economy. It wasn’t good enough for people that we handled inflation better than other Western countries. It didn’t matter that Trump caused a lot of the inflation with the PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) and the GOP’s refusal to have oversight. The only thing that mattered was that people were mad and wanted change. They couldn’t figure out who to be mad at, and just chose the current people in charge. As a populace, we’re not smart enough to understand deeper than that, and we just keep flipping the switch back and forth hoping it works, in spite of the fact that the biggest reason we don’t go anywhere is that we keep flipping the switch back and forth.
The only reason he ran at all is that he originally thought he had the best chance of winning
I think the whole premise is wrong. It’s becoming clearer that the reason he insisted on running (despite much internal push-back) was to hold onto power for himself. It had less to do with the stakes than it did with his self-serving desires. You’d have to be completely senile to think you could beat Trump after that debate performance and all of the context surrounding it. He’s STILL insisting that he could have won. On what planet? Let’s assume he knows what’s at stake.
Is that easier for you than “he’s a good person who tried his best and failed”?
Tried his best to… what? Drop out and let someone else more likely to win try for it? Doesn’t seem like he wanted that. And nobody here thinks Biden would be worse than Trump. But that’s not how American politics work. This is a reality show.
I’m very much not willing to say “he’s a good person”, whether or not he could have won again. Supports genocide, breaks strikes, and throws trans people under the bus after promising to protect them. He’s an evil shitty person, whose interests sometimes aligned with helping the general public.
It sure is easier to sit on the sidelines than it is to actually lead. He absolutely wasn’t perfect, but I absolutely believe he tried to represent the American people to the best of his ability.
Also he literally stepped down and let someone else try based on feedback.
He was willing enough to listen to other people despite his doubts.
And now he’s calling backsies on that.
Exactly. He made a choice and should stand by it.
He’s whining about what ‘could’ have been instead of looking at what should have been (had he chosen to back out earlier or, even better, allowed someone else to run in the first fucking place).
I promise you that you don’t have shortfalls like he does in magnitude. And at least you own up to them.
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.
There was some discussion I saw that alleged those polls never reached him. Instead ended at the inner staffers.
Not excusing his current opinion.
deleted by creator
Not even American and I know that’s BS lol
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.
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.
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.
This feckless fuck over here, I am starting to think Ol’Corn Pop beat the dog shit out of him back in the day.
End Citizens United, force retirement at 65, and term limits for all governmental appointments and elected officials.
As my old granddad used to say “If one stinks of shit you best believe they all stink of shit.”
I know grandpa I know. Now come drink your date juice
