Yglesias on Biden

Matt Yglesias has a critical piece up on Biden.  I am largely in agreement with Yglesias’ take, although I tend to see his failings as due to longstanding character traits, while Yglesias puts more emphasis on Biden’s age.  A couple of snippets (the whole thing is worth reading, but not sure if it is public):

Of course, many good people served in the Biden administration. And the administration did a number of admirable things. But on a fundamental level, Biden defined his entire post-2016 political comeback in terms of averting the Trumpian threat to American political institutions. And he failed, catastrophically! It’s not just that Trump won, it’s that he has returned more powerful than before. It’s that we are genuinely much worse off than we would have been if Trump were narrowly reelected in 2020. It’s that Biden alienated an entire cohort of young people, along with many of the leaders of the most important companies in America.

[. . .]

The obvious reality is that Biden and a relatively close circle of aids mislead many of their own appointees and fellow Democratic Party elected officials. They lied to the public, not convincingly enough to persuade most Americans, but convincingly enough to persuade most Democrats, and in the process, made their friends and supporters look ridiculous. They selected a VP nominee they didn’t have confidence in as a party leader and whom they did not set up to succeed. And they put the whole Democratic Party in a series of impossible situations because of their hubris, or vainglory, or I don’t know what. And I’m concerned that we’re now in a situation where the only people who want to say that publicly are either Republicans or, to a lesser extent, leftists.

There’s an urgent need for common sense Democrats to buck the establishment and admit what everyone knows: Biden fucked up, badly, in his handling of his age, and the effort to keep this under wraps seems to be related to some of the ideological failings of his presidency.

[. . .]

When you look at specific critiques about how Biden couldn’t make choices and set priorities, or too reluctant to say “no” to liberal interest groups, or not enough of a fighter or had bad vibes, they all trace back to a president who couldn’t put in a full-time schedule or be forceful.

As long as Biden was in office, it made sense for Republicans to focus on his infirmities and for Democrats to be defensive. But at the end of the day, it was good for Republicans that Biden was so old and doubly good for Republicans that Biden chose a relatively weak politician as his VP. The people who got screwed by this decision-making were you and me, and thousands of down ballot elected officials who were harmed by his unpopularity, and tens of millions of people whose SNAP and Medicaid are now imperiled by the GOP trifecta.

I’m angry about this!