My general feeling is that the liberal ecosystem was far too positive about Joe Biden and his administration, and that this is part of what killed them in this election.
I feel that they thought he was more beloved and respected than he actually was. That he was this great elder statesman. Because of this, it took them longer than it should have to understand just how unpopular and despised he could actually get. They were naive about his age and deterioration, too.
Some, like Matthew Yglesias, could not see it.
Others, like Ezra Klein, did.
But if you read the Klein column you see the rest of the issue: they thought his administration was a rousing success. Klein makes a strong case for replacing Biden, but of the administration, he writes:
The Biden administration and congressional Democrats passed a series of bills — the bipartisan infrastructure deal, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act — that will make this a decade of infrastructure and invention. A decade of building, of decarbonizing, of researching. They expanded the Affordable Care Act, and it worked — more than 21 million people signed up for the A.C.A. last year, a record. They did what Democrats have promised to do forever and took at least the first steps toward letting Medicare negotiate drug prices.
And the Biden team, they said they were going to run the economy hot, that at long last, they were going to prioritize full employment, and they did. And then inflation shot up. Not just here but in Europe, in Canada, pretty much everywhere. The pandemic had twisted global supply chains and then the economy had reopened, and people desperate to live again took their pandemic savings and spent. And the Biden team, in partnership with Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve, got the rate of inflation back down, and we are still beneath 4 percent unemployment.
And I don’t want to just skip over that accomplishment. Most economists said that could not be done. The overwhelming consensus was we were headed for a recession, that the so-called soft landing was a fantasy. It got mocked as “immaculate disinflation.” But that is what happened. We didn’t have a recession. We are still seeing strong wage gains for the poorest Americans. Inequality is down. Growth is quick. America is far stronger economically right now than Europe, than Canada, than China. You want to be us.
He wasn't the only one. Dean Baker at CEPR wrote that "
Joe Biden Has Given Us the Greatest Economy Ever." At Salon, they wrote "
Joe Biden's economy is, honestly, pretty amazing: How come he doesn't get credit?" Yglesias wrote that
Biden's economy was great everywhere except in the polls. This gap, between the polls and the liberal perception of Biden's admin, is what led to all the talk about the
vibecession, one of the most cursed technocrat ideas I've ever seen: the rubes must be deluded by the media because this number here is good.
That was the general perception in the liberal ecosystem going into 2024: Biden is a good president, things are good, and his brain is a-ok. They walked into 2024 unprepared to navigate the actual season: an enormous percentage of the country was unhappy with the way things were and thought he was doing a bad job, an even larger percentage thought he was incapable of doing the job, and people were never going to warm up to him again because he's just some stupid mean dipshit that was carried by Obama's reputation.
This led to a primary season where nobody ran and where some people even convinced themselves that
Trump was the one coming out looking weak. Look at all the votes Biden is getting, they said. He's sweeping the primary; people must really want him as the candidate.
That's how you end up in a situation where it's mid-year and people fecking hate you and the job you're doing and you are totally ill-equipped to meet them anywhere near the vicinity of where they are.
