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I had a weird moment last night of, perhaps, perceiving my own bubble. So I have to ask to verify...
Does anyone actually believe Biden is the president? I don't mean in an election integrity sense. I mean, does anyone actually believe he is the one steering the federal government or making decisions? I could whole heartedly believe Obama was the Commander in Chief. I had zero doubt George W Bush was in command of the highest Executive Office. Sure, Trump seemed to be at war with his own staff half the time, but he ostensibly tried to exercise the power of his office.
Biden seems like he just gets wheeled out to mumble some words of a teleprompter about once a month. He gets 8/10 of them correct, adlibs something he shouldn't have, and then his handlers come out the next day and "correct" his statements. It just strains my imagination to think he is in charge of crafting policy or executive decisions at all.
Then again, I have heard commentary that he's a bit of a control freak, and wants to have final say in every decision, which is why his administration basically floundered for the first year and a half. He refused to delegate and was a major bottleneck. Supposedly reporters covering him over the years, on various campaign trails, have seen this sort of behavior first hand.
So I donno, am I operating somewhere out on the fringes with this notion? Is there anybody here who fully believes Biden is every bit the President in full possession of the authority of his office that Obama or George Bush (either) were? Can you tell me why?
Why not both? He's both insisting on being the part of every decision, and completely incapable of understanding what is going on and actually make complex decisions about complex problems, and also appreciate how much his capabilities have declined. That could explain a lot of the disfunction.
Authority of the office is a tricky thing. Trump's administration demonstrated us how easily the authority of the office could be denied even to the President if the bureaucracy is not afraid to confront him in an open conflict - formally, he had authority over a lot, including the DOJ and the FBI, factually, he was not running the show at all. Of course, with Biden situation is much different, and there's no open war - and no reason for it - between the White House and the bureaucracy. But the same mechanisms could be deployed to softly route around the President instead of openly defying him. Maybe even under the guise of "for his own benefit" - after all, the bureaucracy has been ruling the country "for their own benefit" for decades now anyway, extending the same approach to the President is only logical.
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How much you micromanage every area of policy isn't necessarily the sign of a good President, and a lot of the people we perceive as 'weak' leaders did lots of micromanaging, and vice versa. For instance, if you asked people who was the stronger leader, Blair or Brown, almost everyone would say Blair. But he knew a lot less about policy, especially economic, than Brown did (there's an anecdote about one of his ministers asking whether he wanted cuts to welfare in absolute terms, or relative cuts in terms of % of GDP and the minister concerned makes it out like Blair literally could not comprehend the difference).
Jimmy Carter, too, was an infamous micromanager of policy, but a poorly regarded President.
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What separates someone from being 'properly' President or not? Every President, especially in the modern day, must delegate 99.999% (etc.) of the things the executive does, so I'm not sure that much separates a President who makes, say 1000 individual policy decisions in a year/term from one who makes 700 or 1300.
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Yeah, every time I've had a serious debate about biden dementia I just search 'biden full speech' on youtube and find 30m - 1h long straight speeches that are almost entirely coherent. This doesn't seem like a person with dementia, at all. And it's very annoying that so many people (other platforms or irl, not here) just say 'he has dementia, wow us is in bad shape collapse' when ... it just doesn't seem right. Especially since during trump, the same thing, with a ton of out of context clips of trump seeming stupid on twitter and many dems saying trump had dementia (he didn't).
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No, not even my liberal to a fault wife.
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Tone this down, yo, you're pushing the Building Consensus thing pretty hard right here.
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I'm curious what this means? Certainly many physicists, research mathematicians etc believe biden is president and doesn't have dementia (because they lean left). If you mean 'smart' as in 'smart in this particular area, not being stupid democrats' ... sure, but that's tautological.
Apologies, I was referring to "being the president" in the context of that phrase meaning "actually in charge of the day-to-day government of the country". Of course Biden holds the office of president. This is more about who actually has power in the system, and it mostly isn't elected officials.
I phrased mine poorly too. I mean - A lot of smart people genuinely do believe that biden is as "actually in charge of the day-to-day government of the country" as the president is supposed to be - "he can't control everything, but he makes a lot of important executive decisions". "Who has power" becomes a very complicated question, but many- well, most - smart people are political normies and don't analyze the location of power in the system themselves.
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I would guess Eisenhower actually.
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I believe that Biden is likely calling at least some shots but that it’s at least mildly unpredictable which ones. My model is the Afghanistan withdrawal, where it looks like Biden was calling the shots to the surprise of his own generals who fully expected someone to overrule him and delay the withdrawal again.
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No president is fully in control of the federal government; it's far too large, distributed, and procedurally-bound to ever be controlled by a single person, no matter how mentally-acute and/or vigorous they may be. With that said, there are a number of policy decisions which seem to evidence Biden's particular influence. E.g., the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump tried to do something similar several times, but was stymied by the Pentagon and his own distractability. Biden, on the other hand, has allegedly persistently been a dovish voice in Democratic foreign policy circles since his service in the Obama Administration (a stance sometimes attributed to the influence and then death of his son Beau).
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The degree to which "Biden is not in control" satisfies the ingroup narrative criteria for "too good to check" is extreme.
However, consider the current White House webpage on Edith Wilson:
This is probably the best (and, today, most celebrated!) example of a president who was not the president. (I suspect, if the script were flipped in a possible world where we had a woman president today, a First Gentleman who stepped in to "functionally [run] the Executive branch" would not be regarded as a hero.) As other posters have noted, "the president is being controlled by others" is a common accusation from any given president's outgroup, but we do have historical examples of it happening, so it's insufficient to write such accusations off without examination.
I don't get the impression that Jill Biden is intellectually up to the task of handling the Executive, but she does seem to have her hands mostly full with handling Joe. Though his gaffe-prone career makes it a little difficult to say with total confidence, he really does seem to be in the early stages of a dementia-style decline. And I would bet that someday, when it no longer carries a political cost to do so, someone will write a book, or even a White House webpage, about the "heroes" who ran the government while Joe Biden was in decline.
(But maybe not--there is some indication, albeit disputed, that Ronald Reagan's final years were somewhat comparable to the current state of the Presidency, but I'm not aware of anything praising Nancy Reagan or George Bush for keeping things running smoothly. I also think that the media's prior enjoyment of accusing Trump of being mentally ill, while today carrying water for Biden, does represent clear bias, but that particular bias likely surprises no one.)
This looks to me like a rather cavalier dismissal of a substantial amount of evidence, some of which was provided in this thread.
Yeah, @FCfromSSC understood me correctly. "Too good to check" doesn't necessarily mean that the story is false--it means:
But this has created a bit of a rhetorical shortcut where people will say "oh, that story seriously confirms $OUTGROUP's bias, so they're not even going to check if it's true, therefore it's false."
I feel like it's necessary in such cases for me to acknowledge things like: yes, Biden suffering from dementia would confirm a number of my existing priors. Nevertheless, we have historical precedent of similar things actually happening, so it should not be regarded as only a partisan position at this point to suspect that the President is mentally unwell. There seem, as you and others observe, to be many good reasons to genuinely wonder whether President Biden is a fully-functioning Chief Executive.
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they're not being dismissive. They're saying that "biden is not in control" is something they're highly biased in favor of, and therefore admitting they should be treating it with caution, and then proceeding to lay out some evidence that supports the conclusion.
I guess I got lost in the wording, then. It was not obvious to me that naraburns was speaking about himself.
Even so, I also don't see how the idea that "Biden is not in control" particularly reflects on Joe Biden. Certainly I have a low opinion of the man from years back, but he's not morally responsible for things outside his control. On this specific topic, I am particularly irritated with Jill Biden. She's the one who married the guy, and I do not believe that this charade is in Joe's best interests. Elder abuse is an ugly thing, and that's what this looks like to me.
If I say that Some Guy is actually braindead and is being piloted around by gnomes that live inside their brain, that doesn't reflect negatively on Guy (how could it? They're almost not a person!), and it doesn't really reflect badly on the gnomes either, so why does it seem like an attack?
I think because while it doesn't reflect badly in the world where it's right, it does reflect badly on Guy in the world where it's wrong. It's a paradoxical attack, that lands only if it misses.
I feel that this thought experiment elides more than it clarifies. There's "a guy". there's the things this guy does, and there's a theory for why he does it, and then there's a conclusion about how we should interact with him. The "why" can be a choice between normal brains or gnome control without impacting any of the other variables. whatever the internal details, there's still an entity, and how we're reacting to that entity, and hostility framed as compassionate care remains hostility.
Fair point.
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Gnomes in the brain is an obviously crazy argument, though, whereas dementia in an elderly person is not. That has a bearing on whether the argument is sincere, and therefore whether it's an attack on Guy at all.
I just used gnomes to make the actions of the person obviously not be in their control, for higher contrast.
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Presidents have always delegated and deferred to experts. I think maybe Bill Clinton, Carter, Nixon, and H.W. Bush were the exceptions and were smart enough or had enough initiative to minimize delegation even if it cost them reelection or were wrong. Bill Clinton was obsessed with policy. Others were lazier. Once the presidency became the popularity contest it is today, it became more of a team effort. That's not to say they were puppets. George W. Bush felt as strongly about the Iraq War as anyone else in the administration, and was not merely coerced into supporting it. The Biden presidency is probably the most focus-tested presidency in history...I don't think anything he does is purely spontaneous, but each decision result of exhaustive focus group and tested research, such as the choice of $10k for student loan forgiveness? Why this number? Or the timing of pardons.
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Biden's first day in the Oval Office, he's got a bunch of press with cameras and a huge stack of executive orders in those leather folders. Staff have been talking to everyone who will listen about how Biden's planning to reverse a bunch of Trump's executive decisions immediately--while the point was pushed a bit aggressively, this is par for the course when you get a change of administrations across parties.
At one point when Biden's working his way through the stack, he pauses and says, "What am I signing?" and an off-camera voice responds, "Just sign it." And so he does--the first of many instances in office where the strings were uncomfortably visible.
According to NBC, a few months ago:
If they need the reminder, it sounds like this is an open question.
Biden will say during press conferences that he is not allowed to answer questions, and sometimes I wonder if this is a cry for help.
The politicians I managed at one point, never said that on camera, but they very definitely got strong notes from me saying things like "DO NOT ANSWER THIS QUESTION!!!!!!!. Pivot to talking about taxes/record on whatever etc).
Could they override me, sure. Though given I was employed by the party ignoring me, meant ignoring their own party which could be a bad idea.
I am not allowed to by my public relations team (because it is a bad look) is different than I am not allowed to by my mysterious puppet masters.
I have actually met Biden a couple of times (long before he was president) and he did have a habit of kind of gesturing behind the curtain which kind of fit with his folksy quasi-honesty look. Whether it plays well as President seems more of a stretch. If I was part of his team I would probably me rubbing my temples every time he did that. But maybe it is supposed to play in a kind if "I could tell you but then I would have to shoot you"
This might change my mind. Thanks.
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A president being bound by administration public relations plans hammered out in advance (especially when the President is, like Biden, known to freelance, make shit up, or just misspeak embarrasingly), is not the same as that same president not having the final say over what the substance of policy is.
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I'm open to alternate interpretations, but I can't think of a more plausible one offhand.
I mean, sure, we could go with "the poor dear doesn't know what he's saying, how ridiculous," but...uh...not a winning move, that one.
The alternative is the kind of "married jokes" people make where a man says "I better ask my boss if I can go out to the sports bar tonight." Meaning his wife.
It's still weird for the President to say that but it's a joke in that manner of a man pretending to lack agency or assigning it to his wife.
It doesn't land well but that's the best blue tribe explanation I can think of. It also has the virtue of being the opposite of Trump, who would never pretend to lack agency.
It would be a situation similar to the wife joke if the wife wrote cues on cards to the guy when he is interacting with the other guys and also physically pulling him away from them.
And if the guy started to wander in the wrong direction and shake invisible people's hands without the wife by his side.
I agree with you. Just giving the best blue tribe apologetics for Biden.
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I think it's a little more nuanced than a dichotomy between "Biden is President Grandpa, and his handlers give him a warm glass of milk and his pills and send him off to bed before the real meeting" and "Biden is dictator and gets whatever he wants whenever he wants it (within the confines of the imperial presidency)." Most presidents exist somewhere between those two.
There were tons of doubts that Dubya was in charge. See here for pre 9/11 and [here for in the twilight of the Bush years)(https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/opinion/04sat1.html). Obama was thwarted in many of his personal goals by "the generals" or by his elders in the government over and over. And we don't ever need to get into Trump, whose lack of fluency in bureaucrat cost the country a lot of initiatives that could have been great.
So in all cases the president has limited ability to give orders and have them perfectly obeyed. It is likely that Biden has the ability to prevent any major policy that he opposed, but he can't get all the details right any more than presidents before him could, and he probably couldn't deal with a mutiny from employees/democrats more broadly.
I do think there are reasons to believe Biden exercises less power than his predecessors, but marginally not completely. His general mediocrity across a long career, his vulnerability to being overshadowed by his old boss opposing his policies in a way reminiscent of Taft, his age, his party's precarious hold on relevancy.
But the same things were said about Dubya, that he was controlled by Cheney and a coterie of former advisors to his father, and you now in retrospect cite him as a very powerful president. So either that's less true than was common wisdom at the time, or it's not really that important historically.
I remember an old book by John Stossel, from the Bush Jr. era, and he made the point that the President is not the one steering the ship called America, it's the people who do so.
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I have heard "this President is an empty suit controlled by the real people in charge" for literally every President of my life.
Biden is the first one I actually believe it. Not completely, because he definitely did the Afghanistan withdrawal over his staff's objections.
It does seem like a popular fringe belief in my memory, at least, though I don't remember it getting much traction for most of the presidents (Bush I, Clinton, Obama, Trump) I'm old enough to remember. Bush II was the only one for whom things like "he's just Karl Rove's and/or Dick Cheney's puppet" actually seemed widely believed.
I'm not sure how believable these things should be, just because the prior based on history examined in hindsight is so tiny. The only example I can think of where this category of conspiracy theory might have been true is that some historians think Edith Wilson might have been de facto president after Woodrow's stroke, at least during his worst periods. Centuries of presidents and just one positive example? Even among the people who think Reagan's descent towards Alzheimer's was beginning before his presidency ended, they don't seem to think his wife or advisors were making decisions for him.
I'm old enough (if only just) to have clear memories of Reagan as President and even a snot-nosed 10-year-old like me could tell that he was fading during his last year in office. That said I get the impression that pretty much everyone in his administration was on the same program so to speak and that to the degree that folks were exceeding their authority it often was more to "cover for the old man" than to promote their own agendas (lots of talk about what the president had actually known about and signed off on during the contra hearings). In contrast I don't think there was any genuine doubt about whether Bush I and the Clinton's were setting their own agenda (yes there was a lot of talk about Hillary wearing the pants in the relationship, but that, but that strikes me as a bit different). There was a lot of talk early on about Bush II being the brain-dead thrall of his father's old associate (Dick Cheney) but that my recollection is that line of argument didn't survive his first term.
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I don't have a strong opinion on this, other then the fact that I think he's really old and therefore there might be some truth to wishful thinking on the right stating that he's just a doddering old puppet. But I can assure you that my community is filled with people who have bought into Biden as a cult of personality. My friends go on ad nauseam about how he is a great leader. I even found myself once surrounded by a conversation about how "sexy" he and Fauci were (with the conclusion being that they were both really sexy). Talk about their own form of wishful thinking!
I want to say, everyone else has done a great job pushing back against my bias's RE: Joe Biden as President. Overall the replies have been informative and legitimately challenged my perspective. This however... this is going to give me nightmares. And perhaps drive me to fedpost elsewhere.
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Is this wishful thinking? I don't find it appealing at all to think that our bureaucracy has further cemented control of actual federal power. If the President is at least significantly responsible for policy actions that you don't like, you at least know who to take your beef up with. If all policy originates with regulatory staff in permanent jobs that you've never heard of and the President can't really do anything to change course, that looks much more intractable. I actually thought that was one of the clearest lessons from the Trump administration - you can't really vote for big changes in public policy because many of the staff will just refuse to do things that they don't want to do.
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What's the basis for the claim that they floundered? They got a lot done for a party that has such a narrow hold on the Senate that all policy must please Sinema and Manchin. Some of this was done by simply ignoring normal policy-making and being willing to fight legal battles (e.g. vaccine mandates and student loan patronage). I don't like their policies, but I have hard time understanding the perspective that they didn't get much done.
Well that's why I said the first year and a half. Some time around July is when shit actually started happening. It hasn't been a consistent pace of administrative competence. It's been very loaded directly before midterms. Which is smart I guess. Not sure if they planned it that way the whole time, or seeing the poll numbers lit a fire under their ass.
He walked in the door and killed the Keystone pipeline in his first day on the job. They even restored science with that executive order!
Coming to compromise policies on hundreds of billions of dollars in patronage takes time and greasing of palms. Recall that the Affordable Care Act took 14 months after Obama took office with a much more friendly Senate. When you're figuring out how to dispense that much money, it's not going to be quick to get a bunch of yes votes.
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