Today, Explained - The Good, the Bad, and the Biden

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Biden’s lack of leadership and priorities means he will leave office without any real lasting policy achievements, says Vox's Dylan Matthews. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Matt Collette and Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Laura Bullard, mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members President Joe Biden riding his bike in Cape Henlopen State Park in Delaware. Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All signs seem to indicate that one week from today the United States will break from recent tradition and have a peaceful transition of power. It felt like a good time to assess Joe Biden's presidency, which his staff would have you believe is one of the most consequential in American history, FDR-esque. I admire their loyalty to their boss, but I think Biden is a pretty mid-tier, mediocre president. I don't think he's awful. I don't think he's a horrible threat to freedom the way that you might hear on Truth Social. The main way I would describe Joe Biden is that he was an unusually weak president. And he was, in many important moments, loath to decide when we really needed a president to decide. And I think that ultimately made him less effective than he could have been in the moment.

The good, the bad, and the Biden. Vox's Dylan Matthews is going to help us assess on Today Explained. Conversations with Mike Gitlin, brought to you by Capital Group, offers invaluable knowledge from some of the most experienced investment managers. It's where investment experts, curious investors, and market leaders can go to get their next great idea and see what makes investment professionals tick on and off the clock. With in-depth knowledge and actionable insights revealed in each 30-minute episode, you'll want to invest your time today.

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in knowing what to do when to do it and who to hire start caring for your home with confidence download thumbtack today. Today explains Sean Ramos for him here with Dylan Matthews from Vox, who thinks President Biden was ultimately a weak president. So I think the there's there's sort of the causes of the weakness and there's the symptoms of the weakness. And I think the causes of the weakness, there's a bunch. Joe Biden is really old. Like it's a hard thing to get around. Breaking news.

Come on, man. And I think being the president is a very hard and demanding job and the amount of energy and focus you're able to bring to it really affects how impactful you can be. Bill Clinton was famous for staying up till two, 3 in the morning, like, poring over policy documents with aides, trying to sort things out. But Biden seemed like he was perhaps the opposite extreme.

I was exhausted. I didn't listen to my instincts. There's been some reporting from the Wall Street Journal that a lot of decisions got devolved down to his national security advisor or his economic counsel that ordinarily would be decisions for the president, that he had sort of good days and bad days, days when he could hear stuff and days when he couldn't. The Wall Street Journal is out with a new bombshell report where they spoke to about 50 people or more involved in the Biden White House.

According to the journal, there were limits over who Biden spoke with and what they said to him. Going back to the start of his presidency, even cabinet members who were kept at arm's length. That's gonna make you sort of weaker and less effective, but I think a lot of it also has to do with his position within the party. If you go back to the 2020 primary, it was not as though Joe Biden won a sweeping mandate that showed he was much more popular than everyone else running against him.

I think that left him sort of owing a lot of people a lot of favors and who had to manage a lot of different factions. And I think that that put him in less of a good position to make difficult decisions and expect people to follow him. Let's talk for a moment about what he actually did, his major accomplishments and whether they'll be remembered in 10 years or not. Starting with the American Rescue Plan, remind us what that was and what Joe Biden did and didn't do in terms of the priorities there.

So let's, in our heads, go back to January, 2021. My driver's light. Vaccine distribution. Well, violence sought to shake the Capitol's very foundation. Things are maybe starting to open up, but they kind of shouldn't. People are largely locked down., offices are not reopened. The American Rescue Plan was Biden's sort of

stimulus package for that moment. And it was a mix of a lot of different things. By the time all the money is distributed, 85% of American households will have gotten a $1,400 rescue checks. But there's a lot of other parts too. They gave a lot of money to states to spend as they saw fit. There was a lot of funding for programs like food stamps, Medicaid. There was also an expansion of the child tax credit, which did a lot to cut poverty that year.

That's the estimate. Child poverty will be cut in half as a consequence of what's in this Recovery Act. It was a very, very big package. It was about $1.9 trillion. It's one thing to pass a historic piece of legislation like the American Rescue Plan, and it's quite another to implement it. And the devil is in the details. So Biden's line was, this is what we need to emerge from this catastrophe. It was very much like we're in an emergency This is yes. This is a massive bill, but we need a massive bill to get out of this I want to be clear that like I was saying that in the moment a lot of people were saying that in the moment But there were people at the time who were saying like maybe this is too big Larry Summers is probably the most famous of them

but was was warning that this was such a massive package that it would predictably cause inflation. And at the time, I thought that was ridiculous. I no longer think it was ridiculous. We made an episode titled, How Dylan Got Inflation Wrong. Yeah, my brand as a journalist is I'm wrong a lot. I don't know why people keep paying me for that, but.

So I guess the American Rescue Plan might best be remembered for causing a bunch of inflation, but Biden then got the Build Back Better agenda eventually passed under a different name, the Inflation Reduction Act. Did that right the wrongs of the American Rescue Plan? So I don't know, I know a lot of people who are very enthusiastic about the Inflation Reduction Act. I can't name a single one of them who thinks it reduced inflation. I think there's like near unanimous agreement that that was like a marketing exercise. Yeah, a good one, maybe. But yeah, I think the core of my critique of Biden is his handling of the Build Back

Better process. That this was like his big initiative domestically in the first two years. He had a congressional majority. It was like the two years when Obama passed Obamacare, or George W. Bush passed the Bush tax cuts, Trump passed the Trump tax cuts. Like, it was this window that presidents often get where Congress is on their side,

and they can pass something big domestically. I think the big error of Biden is that Build Back Better from the beginning was not one thing. It was a hodgepodge of a lot of different things. It's a long-term investment in American families. Clean energy addressing the climate crisis, housing, childcare, education, and healthcare. Nearly every Democratic priority.

And when it became clear that they could not do all of those things just politically, that they didn't have the votes to pass everything they wanted. They never decisively made a choice to do one of them and to do it well. And the problem was they had a very thin majority in the Senate that included sort of two problem senators in Christian Cinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. December 2021, Manchin made an offer that would include universal pre-k permanently, as well as expanded healthcare subsidies and clean energy credits. So it's a lot of what they want.

It's not everything. And Biden said no and put out a statement blaming Manchin for the impasse. Come on, man. And Manchin went on Fox News and told Biden the bill was dead. I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can't.

I've tried everything humanly possible. I can't get there. And then Biden put out another statement calling Manchin a liar. Saying Manchin's comments were, quote, at odds with his discussions this week with the president. And then it all broke down. Biden, despite decades in the Senate, knowing that senators are petulant little babies who

you have to appease, just like didn't do it. And I think to some degree, this speaks to his weakness, is reading accounts of this, he just comes across as a guy who could not stand people being mad at him. And that's a person who cannot make clear decisions. Because if you make clear decisions, someone is going to be disappointed by them. Dylan, we've been talking about domestic issues here, but obviously the United States is an important actor on the global stage. And it didn't feel like Biden seemed particularly strong there either.

I mean, after October 7th, he goes to Israel and says, When America experienced the hell of 9-11, we fell in rage as well. While we sought and got justice, we made mistakes. So I caution the government of Israel not to be blinded by rage. And that's kind of what happens. Ukraine, you've got a whole lot of last minute decisions because this hasn't played out like he would have wanted

and now Trump's coming in and might shake the whole situation up. The Afghanistan evacuation, obviously an embarrassment for the United States. Was he also generally weak on the international stage? So I'll disagree with one part of that, which is just to say that I think while the actual evacuation from Afghanistan was bungled, just sort of choosing to go through with withdrawing showed more decisiveness than most American presidents had showed on Afghanistan for the previous two decades. But I think on Israel and on Ukraine, there's definitely something to that. Biden embarked

on a strategy of sucking up pretty relentlessly to Netanyahu, even as tens of thousands of civilians were being killed by bombs. That is an important part of his legacy. On Ukraine, I do think they've been weirdly coy about releasing certain weapons that the Ukrainians need. Things like Atacams and F-16s took a while for the US to agree to send them because they were worried about Russia's response. It sort of speaks to this indecisive, not willing to take a clear sand mindset that

they brought to a lot of issues. Like do you want to win or not? And similarly in Israel, like do you want to stop the killing or do you not? We're going to ask Dylan what Biden did that might actually stick when we return on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Quince. Quince knows that a wardrobe upgrade can give you a ton of confidence, but sometimes it can be crazy expensive. Not with Quince, says Quince.

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Jared Svelter What? David Kramer So some movies that I think are sort of okay, I think are okay because they're like boring and fine. And others I think are okay because some parts I think are brilliant and other parts I think are terrible. Yeah. And they just like exist in the same movie. And the American Rescue Plan is like one of those movies. It's the megalopolis of bills. So go back to the club. Wow. It did, I think, increase inflation in a way that proved very politically unpopular. It also ended what recession existed and got us back to sub 4% unemployment really, really fast. Wages started growing, especially at the bottom. You saw a big reduction in inequality

in the years 2021 to 2024. That's a hard thing to do. We didn't do that in the 2010s. I think that's one part that I think will endure. I think the commitment to bringing chip manufacturing specifically back to the US seems like it's been more successful than I thought it would be. America invented these chips, but as time went on we went from producing 40% of the world's chips down to just over 10%. That's why I designed and signed the Chips and Science Act. Because how can we remain the greatest nation in the world without leading the world in science and technology? TSMC, the big Taiwanese chip maker, has a plant in Arizona and they're saying that their workers there are as good as their workers in Taiwan and it's all going according to plan.

That's not something that I think anyone voted on in 2024, but making sure that the world has a process to build these things that the world runs on that is not entirely located on a tiny island that is constantly on the verge of being invaded seems good. Fair. While we're talking about things

that he actually accomplished in Congress and maybe giving them a second chance, the Inflation Reduction Act, you know, dedicated hundreds of billions of dollars to updating infrastructure and to environmental initiatives across the country, states red and blue and purple. And yet it feels, Dillard, like we are not seeing a lot of what Biden set out to accomplish being realized. There's been reporting on how tens of billions of dollars have been spent on updating broadband infrastructure, but yet not one house has seen the benefits of that investment. What is going on? It's not great.

The Inflation Reduction Act was all carrots and no sticks. And I think to some degree, that was a smart political decision. The sticks in this case would have been something like a carbon tax, something like cap and trade, something that actually like put a price on polluting. And it became clear that there weren't the votes for that. So there was a decision made to do this entirely through compliments and roses.

Instead of making it more expensive to drive a gas car, you make it cheaper to buy an electric car. Instead of making it more expensive to run a natural gas plant, you make it cheaper to run a solar plant. When I took office, we set a goal to produce 100% carbon free electricity by 2035. Because of my commitment to clean energy future, Made in America clean energy companies started investing here. The issue is loans. Like you just need to buy things that are really expensive up front. And so having to pay more interest on those loans is really, really bad. And they had to pay a lot more interest because there was a lot of inflation. And to fight the inflation, the Fed had to raise interest rates. And so it's this like one hand of the Biden administration's policymaking that sort of overheated the economy, led to inflation, raised interest rates, that is then sort of helping to strangle another part of the economy that more than the rest of the energy sector really relies on low interest rates to succeed.

You know, we started off the Biden presidency, Dylan, on this show, talking about dozens of executive orders is any of that stuff that he did on the border on the climate on On international policy gonna stick around or is it just so easy to reverse? I mean the most recent one we saw of course was this you know preserving a bunch of our coasts from from offshore drilling Obama got a lot of crap for not being willing to do as much with executive power as a lot of sort of activists

wanted him to do. And I think the experience with trying to use executive power a lot more under Biden sort of gave us one answer of why. I think a lot about the student loan situation. By freeing millions of Americans from this crushing debt, of student debt, it means they can finally get on with their lives instead of being put their lives being put on hold. They canceled a lot of debt.

They did not cancel all of it. And so there was still a lot of discontent among activists who were calling for this. The Supreme Court said it was illegal for them to do this. And so sort of a lot of their efforts got overturned and just didn't happen. And at the same time, while this was happening, there was this colossal screw up within the Department of Education around FAFSA, which is the financial aid forum, just like hundreds of thousands of people applying for college financial aid, like didn't get it or were severely delayed because the department was sort of backed up and processing

it. I think there's a lot of indications that that happened because all their energy was on the student loan thing. It turns out they can't do that the Supreme Court says is illegal, but they spent all their time on it and they weren't like doing the normal functioning of the department of getting financial aid to people who need it right now. I think that's a real cautionary tale. Like you need to just just, like, run the government well. And, like, all these sort of exotic uses of presidential powers to do things that Congress won't let you do, there's no magic wand.

And it's so easy to chalk up falling down on the job, being absent, being absent-minded to his age. Is it really that simple, Dillon? Or is that reductionist? What do we think? I think his age probably has something to do with it. But I think something you hear from both admirers and critics of Joe Biden is that he goes

where the party's going. In the 80s, when you had to be sort of like a moderate Democrat to get anywhere, he was talking about the death penalty and being tough on crime. The president's plan doesn't include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, not enough prosecutors to convict them, not enough judges to sentence them, and not enough prison cells to put them away for a long time. Then you move to the Obama years and he's like a loyal Obama Democrat. Now is the time to heed the timeless advice from Teddy Roosevelt.

Speak softly and carry a big stick. End of quote. I promise you the president has a big stick. You move to 2020 and he sort of soaks up a lot of this Bernie and Warren energy and moves left during the general election in a kind of surprising way. A phenomenal opportunity to deliver a bold progressive vision to the American people. Guaranteeing that every American has health care, affordable health care. He sort of moves with the party.

And I think that is a very sensical thing to do as a safe state Democrat in the Senate. That is probably the optimal strategy. It's really bad in an executive. You need someone who has opinions. When I think back to Biden's campaign, Dylan, I was never wowed. Certainly, it was no Obama campaign in, you know, 2008 or even 2012. But if I can think of one pledge he made, he was like, you know, Charlottesville was ugly.

It was heinous. It is not who we are. I'm going to get into office and reset the tone. Did he ultimately at least succeed there? And is any success wiped out by the fact that literally the guy who preceded him is going to be the guy who succeeds him? Well, nothing like Charlottesville happened when Biden was president. So I'll give him that in the very most narrow of senses. I think if you think more broadly as the Trump era was an era of not just of sort of organized racism, but of of corrupt patronage, sort of familial based circles of nepotism and and self-dealing. I found his decision to pardon Hunter predictable, but sort of the ultimate punchline on that aspiration.

If you're going to run against someone because you think that they don't believe in the rule of law and that they put their cronies and their family ahead of the common good to then go around and pardon your son for crimes that he for sure did. Like, what are we doing here? So you don't buy his argument that, you know, his son was going to be unduly prosecuted for those crimes? I think there's all kinds of people who are probably going to be unduly prosecuted for their crimes in the Trump years. None of them got pardons.

I guess we'll still see. But he did pardon his son. That seemed important to him. And it's not the biggest thing in the scheme of his administration, but I think a major feeling I have about the Biden years is I was lied to. I was lied to about what you were going to do. I was lied to about the extent of your mental capabilities and the degree of your aging.

And that was a moment of, right, this is how it feels to be lied to. This is how it feels to be cheated. Dylan Matthews, I'll never lie to you. I'll never lie to you, Sean. Dylan's Biden epic drops at Vox.com on Tuesday. It'll be titled, The President Who Couldn't Choose. We ended like a rom-com.

Our program today was produced by Peter Balanon Rosen. He was edited by Matthew Collette and Miranda Kennedy. Fact check by Laura Bullard and mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir. I'm Sean Ramos-Virman. Here's something a little different. We're working on an episode about gentle parenting, like talking to your three-year-old

about their big feelings. Might feel totally normal to you, but maybe your parents think it's a little over the top. We're hoping to hear from you younger parents about the differences you have with your boomer parents when it comes to raising your kids. We wanna hear you vent, but we also wanna hear from grandma and grandpa, especially if you all

have a sense of humor about the whole thing. Give us a call if so, 844-453-4448. 844-453-4448, 844-453-4448. That's coming soon on Today Explained, but we're gonna dig into the politics of fire on the show tomorrow. you