I’m a dyed in the wool Bernie Sanders supporter. While others ran from the label, I was proud to be called “Bernie Bro” by others here and wore it as a badge of honor (and still do, though I do reject the mysogyinst connotations, that was never me). I never truly disliked Joe Biden, just didn’t think much of him. While he and Bernie are about the same age, Physically I saw Bernie as strong and vibrant, Joe struck me as frail and weak.
When I saw them in the debates, to me Bernie seemed to make great points and argue them well, while I dismissed Joe as just a cranky old man shaking his fist at the neighborhood kids on his lawn.
I ridiculed and derided him as too centrist, too establishment, and too old fashioned (yes I know Bernie is slightly older, but his approach is still new and refreshing, his appeal to young voters is no accident, but I digress). When Joe came in far from the lead in the early primaries I dismissed him as washed up. When I saw him say he had no empathy for young people I was enraged and swore I’d never respect him again (that one still stings and no I have not forgotten it, but I have gotten over it).
I was not impressed with his choice of Kamala Harris as his VP, I thought it was nothing but naked pandering, and that her presence on the ticket would bring out more people to vote against it than for it. I was certain that Trump would wallop Joe in the general election and that we would quickly descend into a neo-fascist dictatorship as a result.
I was convinced that even if Biden somehow won, he would let republicans run roughshod over him just as they did to Obama, and that he would let them get away with it and further strengthen their position, again just as they did under Obama. Obama was a good man but he just didn’t seem to have much fight in him. In my opinion he foolishly believed that republicans would respect him and his office enough to deal with him in good faith. We all know how that turned out, and I was sure we’d see a repeat of that under Joe Biden.
I was wrong. Oh boy was I wrong. Joe is turning out to be very impressive indeed. He’s learned the lessons of the Obama years and he’s turning out to be one damned smooth operator. In some ways he seems to be following Teddy Roosevelt’s advice of speaking softly but carrying a big stick. Once he took office he immediatly began rolling back the nightmares of the past four years, but it hasn’t stopped there. He’s payed due lipservice to the notion of bipartisanship, but he’s making it abundantly clear that if republicans don’t want to work with us, we’ll go around them without hesitation. That will play into their long term future as it will show them as being the obstructionists they are in ways that did not happen during Obama’s time.
Joe is also showing us an impressive command of how to operate within the body politic. If you think about it, it should come as no surprise really. Decades in congress and 8 years in the Whitehouse have given him a background and systemic knowledge that he is now able to bring to bear in advancing his goals. He is showing us that he is not just a consummate politician, but that he knows how to wield power effectively.
In retrospect, I guess a clue to his mastery of politics should now seem evident from his campaign against Trump. He didn’t have to do a lot of hard core attacking, he knew he could just let Trump be Trump and his unfitness for office would reveal itself. All Joe had to do was point the finger and stand back.
Finally, it seems to me that Joe has come around to a lot of progressive ideas that he did not seem to be very interested in during his campaign. His commitment to climate change mitigation appears to include many ideas from the “Green New Deal”, and he has acknowledged and denounced the disparity of treatment between the white supremacist insurrectionists and Black Lives Matter protesters. Joe Biden is turning out to be a far better president that I would have ever expected. I’ve never been so happy to be wrong in my life. Mr. President I think you are doing great, can you ever forgive me?