{"id":75429,"date":"2021-07-24T18:02:03","date_gmt":"2021-07-24T22:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=75429"},"modified":"2021-07-24T18:02:03","modified_gmt":"2021-07-24T22:02:03","slug":"biden-will-do-whatever-hes-told-even-if-it-gets-him-kicked-out-of-the-oval-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=75429","title":{"rendered":"Biden will do whatever he\u2019s told, even if it gets him kicked out of the Oval Office"},"content":{"rendered":"

Be careful what you wish for: Biden will do whatever he\u2019s told, even if it gets him kicked out of the Oval Office<\/h1>\n

\"\"

\u00a9 Reuters \/ Jonathan Ernst<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

Helen Buyniski
\nRT.com<\/p>\n

Most Americans seem to believe that, while Joe Biden is sitting at the Resolute Desk, he\u2019s not actually doing the job \u2013 and it\u2019s not inconceivable to suggest whoever\u2019s calling the shots has their own Oval Office ambitions.<\/p>\n

Multiple\u00a0polls<\/a>\u00a0indicate a minority of Americans believe Biden is really running the show at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Many\u00a0seem to think<\/a>\u00a0Vice President Kamala Harris is the real power behind the throne, or that some combination of the State Department and National Security Adviser, a Kissinger-style Deep State, is actually calling the shots.<\/p>\n

One problem with analyzing the behavior of such a president is that it\u2019s hard to tell where his actions (or inactions) begin and where his puppetmasters\u2019 might end. The New York Times on Tuesday\u00a0praised<\/a>\u00a0Biden for staying away from \u201cunpopular<\/em>\u201d spending plans, even though the president has effectively spent more of Americans\u2019 money in less than a year than most previous presidential administrations put together. Where it concluded that such spending was \u201cpopular<\/em>\u201d isn\u2019t clear \u2013 indeed, the Times ultimately admitted the blandly positive poll data it was using \u201csignal[ed] a fundamental lack of public controversy around the proposals to this point<\/em>\u201d \u2013 i.e. the pollsters were asking questions guaranteed to deliver a thumbs-up for Joe Biden rather than an approximation of the popular opinion.<\/p>\n

In its glib praise for the president, the Times congratulated Biden for refusing to be tempted by\u2026healthcare reform (i.e. Medicare for All), the one issue on which he opted not to spread Americans\u2019 taxes around. One of the most popular issues among Democratic voters, Medicare for All isn\u2019t necessarily reviled by conservatives either, especially after the coronavirus pandemic stripped millions of Americans of their health insurance when they lost their jobs.<\/p>\n

Medicare for All is vocally\u00a0supported<\/a>\u00a0by half the House Democratic Caucus and hundreds of unions, professional organizations, and other workers\u2019 coalitions. The most recent version was introduced to the House by Rep. Pramila Jayapal in March and should, in theory, have no trouble sailing through a Democrat-controlled House. Biden would gain the progressive support he\u2019s never really had, and the half-million Americans who go bankrupt due to\u00a0medical bills<\/a>\u00a0every year would get a new lease on life and an unlikely hero in the neoliberal Biden. Surely, Biden – or whoever\u2019s advising him – can see this as a win which would burnish his floundering image?<\/p>\n

Yet the policy is being snubbed, and the Times is making it clear that it will continue to be snubbed. With single-issue\u00a0anodyne polls<\/a>\u00a0giving Biden a moderate advantage (over nobody, as the poll does not compare him to any opponent, hypothetical or otherwise), the president may think he\u2019s doing just fine, but calling the frenetic money-printing and menacing inflation at the Federal Reserve a \u201cgood<\/em>\u201d economy \u2013 as a YouGov survey from Monday claimed 45% of respondents did \u2013 sounds like someone\u2019s having some fun at Biden\u2019s expense.<\/p>\n

A little over a third of Americans believe Biden is actually performing the duties of president, according to a poll conducted earlier this month by the Trafalgar Group. That includes nearly a third of Democrats, and a dismal 11% of Republicans, while just a quarter of independents (who, the narrative managers hope you\u2019ll forget, are more numerous than Democrats or Republicans) agree. Just over a fifth of young people \u2013 those under age 24 \u2013 believe he\u2019s \u201cfully executing the duties of his office<\/em>,\u201d a statistic that doesn\u2019t bode well given that the Democratic Party has previously relied on the youth vote to survive, repeatedly conning debt-burdened college students into casting their vote for deep-pocketed good ol\u2019 boys as if the two demographics overlapped.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just Biden\u2019s kicked-dog delivery, or his news appearances in which he self-admonishes (\u201cI\u2019m going to get in trouble!<\/em>\u201d). Fourteen Republican lawmakers have called for him to take a cognitive fitness test, a move which could normally be put aside as political theatre, given the party dynamics \u2013 indeed, his predecessor Donald Trump faced the same challenge. However, half the country was questioning Biden\u2019s mental fitness back in March according to a Rasmussen poll, observing his refusal to take direct questions from reporters among other issues. As the oldest man to ever sit in the Oval Office, it\u2019s not unreasonable to at least raise questions about Biden\u2019s faculties and, if anything, the knee-jerk rush to his defense only makes things more suspect.<\/p>\n

Biden certainly hasn\u2019t helped such perceptions, making controversial pronouncements of the type any president might make only to have to walk them back, seemingly having overstepped a mark laid down by\u2026someone. On Monday, he lamented that Facebook was \u201ckilling people<\/em>\u201d by permitting anti-vaccine \u201cmisinformation<\/em>\u201d to proliferate on the platform, a talking point he has returned to repeatedly as part of his push for more social media censorship. The only problem? His administration and Facebook seemed to have already settled their differences, applying a scarlet letter to 12 accounts his administration has blamed for 65% of the \u201canti-vaccine<\/em>\u201d content on the platform. Biden revised his accusation \u2013 Facebook wasn\u2019t killing people, it was just filling their heads with wrongthink \u2013 and establishment pundits did their best to clean up after the president.<\/p>\n

If all it takes to present Biden\u2019s docility as bold action is a limp Times profile in which the man is praised for dodging the issue of Medicare for All \u2013 a matter that tops many Democrats\u2019 lists regarding a policy \u2018must\u2019 \u2013 it\u2019s questionable how long the narrative managers really want Biden around. The aftermath of the coronavirus\u2019 fiscal bloodshed is perhaps the only time Medicare for All might attract significant interest from conservative voters; with millions out of work \u2013 and thus uninsured \u2013 thanks to the Covid-19 shutdowns, Americans of all political stripes have been placed in the same sinking ship, and Biden could make a lot of friends if he were to bring the country together over such a broadly appealing issue.<\/p>\n

Yet Biden has not only pledged to veto Medicare for All if it comes across his desk, but his lieutenants in the House and Senate won\u2019t even utter the policy\u2019s name, as if it\u2019s cursed. \u201cBiden may have found a way to skirt an ideologically divisive fight<\/em>\u201d (as the Times says) by assuming Washington\u2019s favorite yoga pose, the \u201cdoormat<\/em>,\u201d but it\u2019s unlikely this will win him any support from the progressives who still have a sour taste in their mouths over voting for him in 2020. The only question that lingers is whether it\u2019s Biden who\u2019s shunning healthcare reform, or someone else in his office angling for their turn in the big chair. Kamala? Is that you?<\/p>\n

___
\nhttps:\/\/www.rt.com\/op-ed\/529978-biden-medicare-puppet-kamala-healthcare\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Be careful what you wish for: Biden will do whatever he\u2019s told, even if it gets him kicked out of the Oval Office<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}