The New York Magazine runs a piece that seem to say so….
Barack Obama had people crying when he took the oath of office….
It was ‘Historic’….
Barack Obama , with Joe Biden as his sidekick got ‘Obamacare’….
He also pulled a country out of a scary economic freefall…
But?
In two years Joe Biden has got thru a pandemic, recession, Joe Manchin AND Donald Trump…..
Biden’s people think their boss deserves some prop’s inspite of his lousy polling numbers , which seem to be on the upswing…..
Biden has got little respect for things he has accomplished ….
The media IS STILL fixated on Donald Trump…
And let’s face it….
Joe Biden is NOT the charismatic guy that Obama or even Trump is….
It shows….
But in the linked piece the question asked seems to be …
‘Is it about what get’s done?….or Perceptions?’
Obama and Biden are two different Democratic President’s….
Biden has had eight years as an understudy to form who and what he wants to be….
But increasingly?
He HAS turned from the behind the scenes careful guy to more of the ‘throw-down‘ political puncher….
He likes his job one would think…
He’s gonna have to change his act…..
‘Good guy’s come in last’……
“There is no way to get around the fact the last month or so has been stellar for the administration,” Charles M. Blow declared in the New York Times. “Joe Biden’s Presidency Is Suddenly Back From the Dead,” Jonathan Chait wrote in this magazine. Bob Shrum compared him to Lyndon Johnson.
Nobody was under any illusion that Biden had personally crafted the climate deal or artfully twisted the right arms to get it done. More accurately, it fell into his lap — months after he’d last tried to cut a compromise on his Build Back Better plan with Manchin. If Biden could have made it happen sooner, he would have. But just as presidents can fall victim to external disasters over which they have little control (see gas prices), history remembers even indirect victories as their own, too. What Biden did was leave the door open to a bargain, recognizing the awkward reality that Schumer and Manchin had more space to maneuver without his voice in the mix complicating the politics that faced the prickly moderate from coal country. Biden and Schumer had also allowed Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell to believe the administration’s climate ambitions were toast; the prevailing theory in Washington is that the Kentuckian agreed to the chips bill only because he trusted that the big-ticket ones were dead.
If Biden’s abrupt turnaround can be attributed to a style of governance that is still emerging, that style is decidedly un-Obaman. The crown-jewel victory — the Inflation Reduction Act, containing the climate provisions — was painstakingly lashed together in secret by a crew of senators, including longtime denizens of Biden’s old stomping ground. The president’s own hand was nowhere to be seen in public until it was on the verge of passage, an echo of how the maximally precarious gun bill had moved through Congress a few weeks earlier. Whether because of changing times and opposition or recognition of their fundamentally distinct political strengths, Biden has veered far from the Obama model to get things done. It’s been months since he mounted a concerted effort to galvanize public opinion with the presidential bully pulpit, and he has never attempted to use an academic style of persuasion, as Obama often did.
Obama was elated to learn of the climate agreement. But as the ex- and current president celebrated, a telling gap began to open. Biden’s West Wing sold the Inflation Reduction Act as the largest climate investment ever, period. Publicly, Obama agreed, calling the law a “BFD” — a nod for nostalgists to Biden’s famous appraisal of Obamacare. Privately, however, Obama saw the legislation as a step forward — a bend in the long arc of history he often cites — and not a transformative leap. It was possible to read this as sour grapes, or at least wry analysis, from a retired president whose own grandest ambitions had been thwarted at almost every turn. Yet no one on earth understood what Biden was facing better than the man who’d held the job for eight years. The two simply saw change-making differently. Obama, in fact, had been getting updates from Schumer all summer and had been quietly musing that a climate plan might be revivable, fashioned from the surviving shreds of Biden’s Build Back Better platform. He just hadn’t necessarily seen the idea as an epochal one — more like a pragmatic concession that Biden’s original ambitions couldn’t work in this version of Washington. The difference in perspective speaks to one of the oldest lines of tension in Obama and Biden’s relationship and a question that is now more pressing than ever: What is the right way to be a Democratic president?…
image…Financial Times