A notable thing about the Biden Admin is that they made a bunch of basically “Junior varsity” mistakes: own-goals that any seasoned political actor should have known not to do.
Here are some of the big ones:
- They constantly needed Joe Manchin to stop them from spending money that they shouldn’t have been spending in the first place, and ended up with politically toxic inflation/interest rates as Jerome Powell had to deal with the inflationary spending that Joe Manchin had let through.
- They let the border remain entirely open for three years, before finally making some half-assed efforts to close it once the election loomed.
- They made absolutely no rhetorical noise about urban crime spikes triggered (at least in part) by soft-on-crime policies and police demoralization/quiet-quitting in the wake of the Floyd riots.
- They took a bunch of stands on minor, symbolic issues that were wildly unpopular, and yet had roughly zero policy significance. These included prosecutions against Trump, rejecting the Hyde amendment, and certain silly little stuff related to DEI. However, by far the most important was the administration’s declared support for youth gender medicine and biological male participation in girls sports – issues that are relevant to only a few thousand kids annually, have no measureable effect on mental health whatsoever, and utterly infuriate the median voter.
Here are three links that explain, I think, how these errors came about.
First, in 2020 they hired a bunch of incredibly woke and pompous people with views wildly out of step with the median voter, often disjointed from reality, and nevertheless bearing the formal qualifications of “experts.” Because of their “expertise,” they thought they should get to answer fundamentally subjective questions of public policy, and the top policy people were too cautious to consistently shut them down. Here is a representative profile of one such idiot. Note the way that her job inter
Second, Biden hired a ton of extremely progressive people and then basically thought he could let his staffers run the country. Here is a great, in-depth look at that dynamic. He would rarely object to any decision-memo that came before him, so if his staffers could agree on something, he would let it happen. That forced his moderate top-advisors (Ron Klain, Jake Sullivan, Susan Rice, Gina Raimondo, etc.) to constantly be the bad guy in meetings and pull rank, even though they barely outranked their mor numerous and progressive officemates. Accordingly, it was only by 2024 that the progressive staffers were finally restrained. Shouldn’t Biden have been the bad guy in meetings? Was it really a good idea to leave mild-mannered subordinates responsible for shutting down everyone’s favorite ideas over and over and over? Should we be surprised that they got tired of doing that?
Third, the entire democratic policy apparatus outside the Biden administration decided to become hacks. Here is a personal story from Matt Yglesias about chatting with some important people about the doomed Biden Childcare bill. It is mixed in with political/policy analysis, but the interesting part is Yglesias’ surprise at seeing that key decisionmakers did not know basic details about the bill, because true information was downplayed in order to promote office-peace. I find intriguing the parallel to the fiasco regarding Joe Biden’s personal cognitive decline. Was a milieu that would obfuscate around such basic, observable truths really an administration that could accomplish… anything?
It’s hard to confidently pin-down the common problem to all of this. But I would posit that the answer is named Joe Robinette Biden. Tone is set at the top. If subordinates are acting badly, you have either chosen the wrong subordinates or given them the wrong incentives. Let’s not do it again.
Indefensible Expectations 