The Biden Paradox
Today on TAP: He deserves our thanks, but 2024 could be trouble.
Joe Biden has had a better two years than we had any reason to expect. If he were 60, he would have high approval ratings and would be the odds-on favorite to win re-election.
The problem is that he is 80 and looks it. If Ron DeSantis is the Republican nominee, he could well defeat Biden.
My reporting suggests that many Democratic officials, who are publicly backing Biden’s decision to seek re-election, privately wish he would retire after one successful term. Weirdly, Biden’s best chance to win would be if Trump were the Republican nominee.
Biden, as a far more progressive president than we anticipated, has been an affirmation for American Prospect values and politics. We founded this magazine 34 years ago, after the Democrats had lost three straight presidential elections. We intended the Prospect to be a bulwark against the drift to the right and a beacon for practical progressive politics.
That drift included not just the Republican Party, but too many corporate Democrats and the conventional wisdom in the media. At the time, many commentators concluded that the Democrats’ main problem was that they hadn’t become more like Republicans.
We believed the opposite. The Democrats had lost their way as champions of working families and regulators of capitalism. Democrats needed to reclaim the ideology of FDR.
The founders of this magazine have lived to see a time when our ideas have had a major influence on national policy. After three Democratic presidents embraced far too much of the neoliberal recipe and cozied up to Wall Street, people who have been part of the Prospect family are now helping to make national policy.
The founders of this magazine have also had the great pleasure of finding a successor, David Dayen, whose leadership is taking the Prospect to new heights of excellence and influence.
In our coverage of Biden, we are neither cheerleader nor scourge. We continue to investigate the corruption of capitalism and the undertow on Democratic politics. We praise the administration when praise is due and criticize it when criticism is warranted. Above all, we do deep investigations of how power is exercised.
Some of Biden’s shift to the left was accidental—the pandemic required drastic measures.
Politics also moved left because reality discredited the claims of neoliberalism and ordinary people were fed up. But progressive ideas were in the air, and the Prospect has been a big part of that shift.
A personal plea: I was a young pup when I co-founded this magazine. I’m now in my seventies. It is a source of real joy and affirmation that a new generation is leading the Prospect; that it is more influential than ever; and that I continue to be part of it.
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Happy holidays to you and yours.
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