![]() ![]() Even Obamacare would have been impossible in today’s Congress. FDR and LBJ had huge majorities to work with for their major accomplishments. Biden, with a half-century of political experience under his belt, can’t count votes. Disregard that our national debt is around 125% of gross domestic product. Put aside the fact there is scant evidence the country is yearning for a new New Deal. He’s proposing, at minimum, several New Deals in spending. Adjusted for inflation, New Deal spending was a little less than $1 trillion in today’s dollars. He misinterpreted the passage of his $1.9-trillion COVID relief package - on the heels of trillions of additional spending under the Trump administration - as a green light for vastly more spending. And yet, he let people convince him that the moment was ripe for a “transformative” agenda, one that would rival the New Deal. And he probably has a point.īiden came into office with the narrowest majority in Congress, arguably in history: a 50-50 Senate with very small margin in the House. Two decades later, his White House staff reportedly lives in a constant state of anxiety about the boss’s inability to police his own words, and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has admitted that they try to keep him from taking too many questions.īiden himself has acknowledged the problem, but he believes it gives him an air of authenticity. He’s already moved on to something else.” It didn’t matter: “Joe Biden is barely listening anymore. “wasn’t bent on its destruction,” Michael Crowley reported in the New Republic, Biden declared: “Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran.”Īccording to Crowley, Biden “surveys the table with raised eyebrows, a How do ya like that? look on his face.” Staffers eventually broke the perplexed silence, offering a number of objections. “I’m groping here,” he confessed after a while, and then had a eureka moment. My favorite example came just after the 9/11 attacks, when Biden met with his Senate committee staffers and went into a “stream-of-consciousness monologue” about how to respond. After all, this is the guy who once asked a man in a wheelchair to stand up and take a bow. Asked to give brief remarks, he’d famously meander for 30, 40 or more minutes about whatever came into his mind.īut his verbosity is a symptom of his larger problem: a lack of situational awareness. ![]() If you’ve spent any time in Washington, you’ve heard stories about Joe Biden’s loquaciousness. ![]()
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