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Whose push? If he's just a puppet letting someone else pull the strings, then isn't that person or group effectively the President? How do you have Democracy and accountability if the literal President is just a figurehead representing unknown people in a political party? Does every Democratic Senator vote to decide what Joe Biden's next position should be? Does Nancy Pelosi call all the shots unilaterally and functionally equivalent to being the president herself except she gets none of the blame or credit if things go badly? Is Hillary Clinton the puppetmaster and electing Joe Biden was politically equivalent to electing her? Is the CEO of CNN actually influencing Joe Biden by implicitly threatening to smear him if he doesn't do what they want? We don't know. And next election cycle, if Joe Biden steps down and another puppet steps up you might have the exact same person/people pulling their strings, bypassing term limits, and pretending to be starting fresh with a new reputation, forgetting all the mistakes they made in the past.
I very much want a President who has policies and agendas, declares what they are openly, honestly, and publicly, and then sticks to them as much as reasonably possible. Because then we the people can decide which collections of policies and agendas we actually agree with and vote for whichever President has the best. Because we the people are supposed to be in charge, not shady politicians making secret deals behind the scenes and avoiding responsibility.
I don't think so, while I do think the Clintons retain some influence within the party. But I'd love to know what particular bunch are the puppetmasters, because I do think things like Brinton and the White House Lawn trans people are happening deliberately, while Biden kiboshed the student loan forgiveness that he was elected on. Is it Kamala? I find that hard to believe, but is there some Obama-era rump set of officials who were firmly Hopey Changey who are using Biden as a way to push forward their slice of progressive activism?
I don't think there's any particular bunch of puppetmasters per se, but a variety of competing powerblocs whose levels of influence waxes and wanes through time. That's the most plausible explanation I can find for the sheer incoherency of US foreign policy over the last two decades.
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When did Biden kibosh the student loan idea? The SCOTUS kiboshed it correctly imo
And notably, Biden almost immediately came up with another idea to try to forgive student loans.
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That, yes, but I was going off all the online moaning about how Biden had stabbed everyone in the back and not done the debt quashing. I suppose I shouldn't get my news from lefty complaining!
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And Biden immediately started working around it, including reneging on the debt-ceiling deal to extend an effective payment pause.
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This is way too binary for no reason. Biden isn't either powerless President Dopey-Grandpa or dictatorial President God-Emperor-of-Mankind, he's somewhere in the middle like every other president. He can do some things, more things with the cooperation of the rest of the state apparatus than he can without it, and he can't do others. He is uniquely limited by Barack Obama's continued existence and popularity, and probably to a lesser extent by the Clintons', in the sense that if he went too far from Barack's wishes on virtually any policy I don't think Biden's policy would survive a Barack Obama speech/MSNBC interview/NYT Op-Ed coming out against Biden's policy.
Biden is not the most popular active member of his own party, that makes him weak and limited. I don't think we have a recent parallel, maybe since Taft? HW was a direct successor to Reagan so it doesn't feel the same (and Reagan was pretty much gone mentally by the end of his term), Clinton was vastly more popular than Carter while in office, by the time Dubya was in office HW and Reagan were firmly in dotage, Obama was more popular than Bill, Trump didn't have much to fear from Dubya and in fact directly defeated his forces in the primary. Back further than that you're getting into Reagan-Nixon, Carter-LBJ type pairings where the predecessor clearly left office a failure.
For example, if Biden wanted to send US Air Force trainers to Lviv, and Barack Obama immediately published an NYT article opposing doing so, I doubt they would be sent, by one means or another the policy would fall apart before arrival. Or if Biden was close to signing a major treaty or passing a legislative compromise, and Obama came out against it. As a result, Biden has to compromise with multiple power bases, both inside and outside the government, to keep his priorities moving forward.
Priorities being a key word. CW doesn't strike me as Biden's number one issue set, and politics always means sacrificing a lower priority issue for you that is a higher priority issue for someone else so that your counterparty will support your priority issue. The CW stuff strikes me as largely the same Third Way slop from the Blair/Clinton years: give the Left enough wedge issue wins that they'll refuse to vote for the other guy, to keep them in line for corporatism.
But on the flip side, Barack and Bill and Hillary and Kamala could all try to force Biden into signing a particular treaty with Russia ending the Ukrainian war, if Biden didn't want to he couldn't be forced to do so. Essentially we're getting a system with multiple vetoes, which creates inaction and favors the status quo and inertial movement.
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