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| Source:The View talking to former President Joseph R. Biden (Democrat, Delaware) 46th President of the United States. |
From The View
"Former president Joe Biden sat down for his first TV interview since leaving office on “The View” Thursday morning, and when asked if he takes any responsibility for Donald Trump’s reelection, he offered a direct answer: yes.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “Because, look, I was in charge and he won. So, you know, I take responsibility.”
From Yahoo News
From what I wrote about this back in December:
"Remember then citizen Joe Biden promising not to run for President in 2020:
"Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term.
While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.
According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.
“If Biden is elected,” a prominent adviser to the campaign said, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.”
Even by October, 2023, it would've been too late for President Biden to drop out. But it would've been better than dropping out 6 months ago:
"Bill Maher called on Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential election, saying the 80-year-old incumbent is too old to run for president and likened him to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The host of “Real Time with Bill Maher” mocked Biden on Friday night, describing the president as the “only democrat who can lose to Trump,” despite the men only having a four-year age difference.
“Someone has to convince President Biden that if he runs again, he’s going to turn the country back over to Trump and go… down in history as Ruth Bader Biden, the person who doesn’t know when to quit and so does great damage to their party and their country,” Maher said, referring to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Ginsburg notoriously decided to not retire during the Obama administration when she could have been replaced with a liberal justice, only to die at the age of 87 in September 2020 during the Trump administration."
I don't agree with comedian Bill Maher on everything. But when he's right, he's damn right. (You put that stronger) And he called it in October, 2023:
"The issue with President Biden isn’t if he will be replaced - it's who will replace him."
To put it simply: if President Biden announced let's say by April, 2023, that he promised not to run for reelection in 3-1/2 years a go to assure voters that he would pass the torch (so to speak) and because it was time "for a new generation of leadership", the Democratic Party would've had a full primary season and Vice President Kamala Harris probably wins the nomination anyway. And she would've been my preferred candidate right out of the gate. And all those townhalls, those debates, those TV interviews, that she didn't want to do this summer and to a certain extent this fall, all those things would've been taken care of during late 2023 and early 2024.
And it's not just that President Biden broke his promise not to run for reelection. It's why he did that is even worst, his lack of reasoning for it. He made it about the economy and that he was the only person up to task of bringing down the high cost of living. When the fact is he knew damn well that his background as a public servant is not economics. He made his carer in Congress as a foreign policy and national security expert. As well as criminal justice and the Constitution. Not economic policy...
From The New Democrat
From what Ederik Schneider wrote about this in April:
"But as Erik Schneider said, had President Biden simply kept his promise to to a one-term President and announced like in April of 2023, that he wasn't running for reelection, he might not have been an issue in 2024, at all. Because whoever the new Democratic nominee would be, that person would have had about a year or so to introduce themself to the country and lay out exactly what they want to do as President and not have to worry about what the President thinks of their agenda. And Vice President Harris might have won the nomination anyway.
We'll never know this because the people around the President, who knew he was struggling mentally and had low energy, didn't have the courage, the character, to either tell the President that he shouldn't run for reelection and why, or at the least leak what they know about his physical and mental conditions, or resign and go public with what they know about him.
You think Democratic donors would've been backing the President the way they did, financially, up until his debate, if they knew he was struggling to remember names of people he knew very well, struggling just to get through his work schedule, physically, getting stuck in-between thoughts when trying to speak? Of course not. If they knew this 2 years ago, if the public knew as well, the Democratic leadership, even, would've called for the President not to run for reelection...
From The New Democrat
So I give President Biden credit for at least acknowledging that he's somewhat responsible for the American nightmare (also known as President Donald Trump) returning to The White House as President again. Rare, if ever, that you even hear a former politician take any responsibility for anything that goes wrong on his or her watch, especially when they're an executive. It's like seeing people jumping out of air conditioners, flying rattlesnakes with wings... you almost feel like you have to be high on meth to see any of those things. Especially even a former politician take any responsibility for anything bad happening on their watch, especially an executive. So I give President Biden credit for that.
But the problem here is (and you can rewatch the interview with The View) it's what he's taken responsibility for. He's taking credit for doing all these things like the infrastructure, the research and development, the prescription drugs, the jobs and economic growth, etc. But the only problem was (according to President Biden) that these benefits come later before Americans can feel them and his administration (perhaps including the President) didn't do a good enough job of selling the benefits of what they were doing.
So on 1 hand President Biden is taking responsibility for the fact that he was too unpopular to even run for reelection, but then he's sort of qualifying that concession by saying it's the voters fault for not seeing the benefits if what he and his administration were doing. But that's more than Donald Trump would give you when he screws up, or any other crooked politician.
Had President Biden said something like:
"Opening the border was a big mistake. We should've kept it close and kept arresting illegals to enter the country illegally. While at the same time I try to get a deal with Congress on a broader immigration package, to deal with the current illegal immigrants, who are only here to work and make a better life for themselves, but who aren't criminals. And we should've done more early on, especially in the 2021 economic package to fix the supply chain and increase economic production, before inflation could become the problem that it became in 2022."
Had President Biden taken full responsibility for why he was so unpopular, (trying to run for reelection with a 36% job approval) along the lines I've suggested, he would've earned a new respect from me as Liberal Democrat, who voted for him in 2020, who comes from the same Scoop Jackson/JFK wing of the Democratic Party, that Joe Biden comes from, because then it would be clear that he gets it. Instead of tying to qualify anything that was bad that happened on his watch.
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