President Biden has surely faced shameful obstruction from the GOP, from Senators Manchin and Sinema, and from the courts -- but on too many issues on which he made big promises, he’s lacked either the commitment or leadership skills to achieve success. Here’s a partial list of promises from Biden's 2020 campaign website and the 2020 Democratic Party platform that Biden campaigned on: - Reduce military spending (dramatically increased instead),
- End drilling on federal lands (expanded instead),
- Stop separating immigrant families and instead compensate them (not done),
- Remove the cap on Social Security taxes exempting incomes over $160,000 (not done),
- Make community college free for two years (not done),
- Create the healthcare “public option” and lower the age for Medicare (instead Medicare keeps being privatized),
- Provide paid sick and family leave (not done, even for railway workers whose threatened strike was outlawed),
- Provide high-quality, universal pre-kindergarten for all three- and four-year-olds (not done),
- Provide Section 8 housing vouchers to every eligible family so that no one has to pay more than 30% of their income for rental housing (not done),
- Make a $2 trillion investment in clean energy (way beyond what’s included in the “Inflation Reduction Act”),
- Provide every city with 100,000 or more residents with high-quality, zero-emissions public transportation (not even mentioned),
- Introduce a constitutional amendment to entirely eliminate private dollars from our federal elections. . . . Enact legislation to provide voluntary matching public funds for federal candidates receiving small dollar donations. . . . Restrict SuperPACs. . . . End dark money groups. . . . Ban corporate PAC contributions to candidates, and prohibit lobbyist contributions to those who they lobby (unheard of since the campaign; these are words from the 2020 campaign website),
- Create automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, early voting, universal vote-from-home and vote-by-mail options, and an election day holiday (only feebly attempted),
- Heavily tax billionaires and corporations (attempted in minor ways, but the pretense that it's been done hurts efforts to do it going forward).
- End U.S. participation in the brutal Saudi war on Yemen (not done),
- Treat Saudi Arabia as a pariah state (instead, the president famously fist-bumped the Crown Prince).
Remember some of these unkept promises? We’re not listing them to shame President Biden. And it’s not merely a wish list. It is what’s actually needed to save the planet, to preserve democracy, to prevent our society from unraveling further into a country where even more millions suffer economically, while a few billionaires call the shots. That kind of unravelling helps right-wing faux-populists like Trump and DeSantis come to power. If you believe Joe Biden isn’t a strong enough leader to deliver what the country needs, let Democrats in Congress know that you want a different and bolder standard-bearer atop the Democratic Party’s ticket in 2024. Many of Biden’s 2020 promises were made due to pressure from the social-justice-oriented base of the Democratic Party. Some progressives who expected very little from the Biden administration are happy that at least some steps have been taken in the right direction. Given so much corporate media boosting of Biden, there's a danger in grassroots Democrats pretending that big things have been accomplished and ceasing therefore to demand them.
Unlike in 2020 when Trump was the incumbent and represented the status quo – albeit a crazy one – in 2024 Biden will be representing the status quo as a huge majority of voters tell pollsters that our country is “on the wrong track.” The risk of an extremist Republican defeating a weakened Biden is very real.
Click here to tell Democrats in Congress: We need a stronger nominee than Biden to defeat the Republicans in 2024.
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