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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33263 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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So I donno, am I operating somewhere out on the fringes with this notion? Is there anybody here who fully believes Biden is every bit the President in full possession of the authority of his office that Obama or George Bush (either) were? Can you tell me why?

I think it's a little more nuanced than a dichotomy between "Biden is President Grandpa, and his handlers give him a warm glass of milk and his pills and send him off to bed before the real meeting" and "Biden is dictator and gets whatever he wants whenever he wants it (within the confines of the imperial presidency)." Most presidents exist somewhere between those two.

There were tons of doubts that Dubya was in charge. See here for pre 9/11 and [here for in the twilight of the Bush years)(https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/opinion/04sat1.html). Obama was thwarted in many of his personal goals by "the generals" or by his elders in the government over and over. And we don't ever need to get into Trump, whose lack of fluency in bureaucrat cost the country a lot of initiatives that could have been great.

So in all cases the president has limited ability to give orders and have them perfectly obeyed. It is likely that Biden has the ability to prevent any major policy that he opposed, but he can't get all the details right any more than presidents before him could, and he probably couldn't deal with a mutiny from employees/democrats more broadly.

I do think there are reasons to believe Biden exercises less power than his predecessors, but marginally not completely. His general mediocrity across a long career, his vulnerability to being overshadowed by his old boss opposing his policies in a way reminiscent of Taft, his age, his party's precarious hold on relevancy.

But the same things were said about Dubya, that he was controlled by Cheney and a coterie of former advisors to his father, and you now in retrospect cite him as a very powerful president. So either that's less true than was common wisdom at the time, or it's not really that important historically.

I remember an old book by John Stossel, from the Bush Jr. era, and he made the point that the President is not the one steering the ship called America, it's the people who do so.

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