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This is way too binary for no reason. Biden isn't either powerless President Dopey-Grandpa or dictatorial President God-Emperor-of-Mankind, he's somewhere in the middle like every other president. He can do some things, more things with the cooperation of the rest of the state apparatus than he can without it, and he can't do others. He is uniquely limited by Barack Obama's continued existence and popularity, and probably to a lesser extent by the Clintons', in the sense that if he went too far from Barack's wishes on virtually any policy I don't think Biden's policy would survive a Barack Obama speech/MSNBC interview/NYT Op-Ed coming out against Biden's policy.
Biden is not the most popular active member of his own party, that makes him weak and limited. I don't think we have a recent parallel, maybe since Taft? HW was a direct successor to Reagan so it doesn't feel the same (and Reagan was pretty much gone mentally by the end of his term), Clinton was vastly more popular than Carter while in office, by the time Dubya was in office HW and Reagan were firmly in dotage, Obama was more popular than Bill, Trump didn't have much to fear from Dubya and in fact directly defeated his forces in the primary. Back further than that you're getting into Reagan-Nixon, Carter-LBJ type pairings where the predecessor clearly left office a failure.
For example, if Biden wanted to send US Air Force trainers to Lviv, and Barack Obama immediately published an NYT article opposing doing so, I doubt they would be sent, by one means or another the policy would fall apart before arrival. Or if Biden was close to signing a major treaty or passing a legislative compromise, and Obama came out against it. As a result, Biden has to compromise with multiple power bases, both inside and outside the government, to keep his priorities moving forward.
Priorities being a key word. CW doesn't strike me as Biden's number one issue set, and politics always means sacrificing a lower priority issue for you that is a higher priority issue for someone else so that your counterparty will support your priority issue. The CW stuff strikes me as largely the same Third Way slop from the Blair/Clinton years: give the Left enough wedge issue wins that they'll refuse to vote for the other guy, to keep them in line for corporatism.
But on the flip side, Barack and Bill and Hillary and Kamala could all try to force Biden into signing a particular treaty with Russia ending the Ukrainian war, if Biden didn't want to he couldn't be forced to do so. Essentially we're getting a system with multiple vetoes, which creates inaction and favors the status quo and inertial movement.
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