Joe is the president we need right now.
Joe and the Dems have accomplished much more than we give them credit for.
Issue #102 OpEd (about 6.5 minutes reading time)
This is my longest op-ed to date, but trust me, it’s worth a read!
I know. I know. A lot of Dems are “mad” at Joe Biden, thinking that he has not/is not doing what they elected him to do. Many Dems are already calling for him to be a one-term president, essentially relegating him to “lame duck” status before 1/2 of his first term is even completed. And really a lot of younger voters and progressives feel that we need younger leaders of our party—ageism at its best—thinking that just because someone is older—OK, MUCH older, they should be kicked to the ash bin, decades of experience be damned.
While at this time, I will not say whether we should have someone else run for the Democrats in the 2024 presidential election, I will say that Joe is the guy we need right now.
As I said in a recent article here, the Dems need to play chess and not knee-jerk checkers as we often do.
A quick “Joe” history:
Joe was first elected to the U.S. Senate at age 29 in 1972. Before he was sworn in at age 30 in 1973, he lost his first wife and year-old daughter in a horrible car crash right before Christmas and became a single dad to his remaining children, Beau and Hunter, who survived the crash. Joe was sworn into office from the hospital room where his boys were recovering. He met and married Jill Jacobs five years later in 1977 and they added a daughter to their family.
Joe served in the Senate from1973 through 2008, and his record over the years on many issues near and dear to progressives and Black people was spotty at best.
Joe had already tried to get the Democratic presidential nomination twice before and failed. He considered running in 2016, but after the premature death of his beloved first-born son Beau in 2015 from brain cancer, he just didn’t have the heart to run for office or to do much else. Joe, one of the “least rich” senators, exhausted all of his financial resources and even took out a 2nd mortgage on his home to pay for alternative treatments for Beau. He finally accepted financial help from Barack Obama, who was a millionaire from the sales of his books.
Even though at first they didn’t really like each other, Barack Obama decided to choose Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008 and 2012, and Joe turned out to be an excellent VP for Obama. Just as it was unprecedented to have a Black president, it was just as unprecedented for a white man to deliberately put himself and his white privilege second to the Black guy.
We all know what happened in the 2016 presidential election…
In 2020, we needed a Democratic nominee who would definitively beat the then-current occupant of the White House.
We had a very long list of potential nominees, and actually, Joe was not my first choice. Again, he did not do well in the first few primaries of 2020, and he almost dropped out of the race again.
But Jim Clyburn (D-SC), a long-serving congressman, saw the potential of Joe as a centrist candidate, as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Clinton had been before him. While supporting many progressive policies, Clyburn realized that most of the voting population, even among Democrats, is in the center and that “Job One” was defeating Donald Trump. Clyburn knew that only Joe Biden could do that and endorsed him just before the South Carolina primary. Most of the other Democratic potential candidates threw their support behind Biden as well. Black people in South Carolina also voted overwhelmingly for Joe. He chose Black-South Asian Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate and later nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Joe Biden did win the 2020 election, garnering 7.5 million more popular votes than Trump, and 36 more Electoral College votes than the 270 needed. The certified Electoral College votes from each state were certified on December 14, 2020, as required by the U.S. Constitution. Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. was inaugurated on January 20, 2021. This was two weeks after Donald Trump instigated an insurrection and attempted coup on the U.S Capitol on January 6, 2021, trying to stay in power despite the results of the free and fair election on November 3, 2020.
President Biden Then
When Joe and Kamala came into office, there were already so many extremely difficult issues on their plate in addition to the regular things new Presidents and Vice Presidents have to deal with:
An incomplete transition because the previous president refused to cooperate.
The aftermath of the first ever attempted coup on the United States government.
40% of Americans, including many Republican politicians who refused to acknowledge his legitimacy as president.
A raging COVID-19 pandemic for which vaccines had not yet been distributed.
A former president who refused to concede his loss and a Republican Party that vowed to stop everything Joe wanted to do.
A 50/50 Senate when most bills needed 60 votes to overcome the filibuster.
An economy from 2020 that contracted 3.5%, the worst contraction since World War II, and an 8.9% drop in the U.S. GDP in the 2020 2nd quarter, the largest single-quarter contraction in 70 years.
An unemployment rate in 2020 of 14.7%, the highest rate since January 1948.
President Biden Now: It IS a BFD!
With so much going on, it is easy to forget exactly what Joe has gotten done for the American people in the last 18 months. He hasn’t yet tackled or even fully addressed everything everyone wants or feels they need, but he has actually accomplished more in less time than Barack Obama, Lyndon Johnson, or Franklin Roosevelt, especially at this time in their presidencies, and with extremely slim margins in both houses of Congress.
So let us count the (major) ways, shall we?
Signed 77 Executive Orders in 2021, 24 of which reversed policies enacted by Trump. Immediate E.O.s on Day One included halting construction on Trump’s border wall and reversing Trump’s “Muslim ban.”
Led the U.S. to rejoin the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and stopped the country from departing from the World Health Organization. (February 2021).
The $1.9T American Rescue Plan (March 2021): Emergency aid grants for higher education students, additional direct stimulus payments of $1,400 for people with AGIs less than $75,000 for themselves and their dependents, basic needs assistance for low-income persons, renters, and the homeless, support for healthcare services including vaccines for 60% of the population, mental health assistance, child care assistance, access to reliable internet services, extended unemployment assistance, and additional assistance for veterans. No Republicans supported the bill.
The largest infrastructure bill since the 1950s, $1T, was passed in November 2021 to funnel billions to states and local governments to upgrade outdated roads, ridges, transit systems, and more. The bill was bipartisan, but Republicans who supported the bill were called traitors by some of their fellow Republicans, and many Republicans who did not support the bill were first in line at ribbon-cutting ceremonies in their districts for initiatives funded by the bill.
The largest gun control legislation in 30 years was passed (June 2022) with bipartisan support, soon after the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas.
The CHIPS and Science Act was passed (July 2022) with reluctant Republican support and only because Mitch McConnell believed that the Democrats could not move forward on their smaller Build Back Better-type bills because Joe Manchin opposed it. The CHIPS Act will move the manufacturing of many computer chips back to the U.S. and fund further research that will be done in America.
Four hours after the CHIPS Act passed, Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced a deal on the new “Inflation Reduction Act of 2002,” completely blindsiding Mitch McConnell and surprising most Democrats. This bill was passed in the Senate through reconciliation, meaning that only 51 votes were needed. Schumer was able to hold all 50 Democrats (including the two Independents who vote with the Democrats) together, and after all-nighters to hear amendments and objections, Vice President Kamala Harris, in her role as President of the Senate, cast the tie-breaking vote. The bill is the largest to address deficit reduction, climate change, inflation, corporate tax increases, and drug price negotiations for Medicare recipients in history. No Republican senators voted for this bill. As a matter of fact, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), immediately declared that Republican support for a codification of the right to same-sex marriage would now probably be abandoned in retaliation.
Also in retaliation, the Republicans in the Senate immediately refused to pass the PACT Act, which would enhance medical treatment and disability compensation to 3.5 million veterans who were exposed to toxic burn pits from 1990 to the present. After much backlash from television host Jon Stewart, many veterans’ groups, and Democratic senators, and realizing that they had just passed a draft version of the bill one month earlier, most Republicans finally voted for the bill.
Joe nominated the first ever Black woman to be a Supreme Court Justice.
Joe and the Senate have placed more judges, including Black women judges, onto lower courts than any previous president.
Gas prices are down more than 80¢/gallon in the last few weeks, unemployment is at its lowest in decades, and Joe has lowered the deficit and added more jobs to the economy than any other president.
Of course, there is so much more work to be done, and neither Joe nor the Democrats are perfect. But they are our best and only hope to hold onto our very republic in the midterms and beyond. Right now, that is “Job One,” and it’s time to help Joe help us.
Gas prices and inflation will get better over just a relatively little more time. Allowing our government to descend into minority-rule authoritarianism will destroy our democracy forever.
What are your thoughts on how Joe and the Democrats are doing? Let us know in the comments.
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