Ah, got it. I was reading it the other way around. My bad.

Um, what? I find your reply incoherent and your link doesn’t work.

My point was that the relevance of Reagan and Biden go hand in hand. If one is relevant then they both are. We either examine the past and learn from it, or we continue to repeat the mistakes.

Now we’re down to the ad hominem. I’ll just point out that you got there first and leave it at that.

Correct, which is why the awful quality of our media and the prevalence of propaganda in our discourse should be a much bigger deal than it is considered as.

Agreed, with a note that the Democratic establishment and their propaganda arm at MSNBC are is as guilty as anyone of causing people to quit caring about facts. Just look at the circus that is the Democratic primary process if you need evidence of that.

instead of shitting on Biden for some random reason

I’m still not shitting on Biden, and I’ve given you my non-random reason. If the Democrats don’t get real about addressing the absolutely justified distrust Americans have in the Democratic party, we are all cooked.

very loosely connected bit of policy that impacted student loans was a deliberate lie.

Nope.

Okay so you have literally no idea whether he even ever expressed any specific approval for the part of the bill

Dude. I’ve put up with your demands for evidence and proved you wrong several times. I’m not your fucking man servant and I figure at this point it’s your turn to prove that he opposed that particular section of a bill he championed through congress. The bill did what I said it did, and he backed it. If you think he opposed that section, then I think it’s on you to show that me made some effort to fix it.

But you definitely know he’s most responsible. Out of everyone.

Three prominent Democrats pushed the bill through congress, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Hillary Clinton. Of the three, only Joe Biden ended up voting for the final bill. That’s about as much of a smoking gun as your ever going to find.

Got it. Where did he come out specifically in favor of this one specific provision?

Let me turn it around since the opposing claim is that he worked with Republicans to soften the bill. Where did he come out specifically against it? Finding clips of Biden back then is near impossible with all the results that come up from his presidency, and I honestly don’t care enough to keep digging.

Yeah, I’ll make sure not to go back in time to 2005 and elect him for anything back then.

Is he running for something now? I hope you are aware that we aren’t talking about a current or future Democratic candidate for anything.

Now they’re getting significantly better.

Biden was among the most conservative Democrats in congress. As president he was one of the furthest left office holders in the party. Biden got way better in the context of the Democrats. I don’t see Democrats as a group getting better at all, with rare exceptions that the establishment does everything they can manage to suppress. You Don’t Hate The Democrats Enough.

No, that was reality. That’s what happened. The promises were twice as big, but the reality was still enormous.

Find me where Biden promised to raise the corporate tax rate back to where it was before Trump (35%) or higher and I’ll eat my words. I’m a little confused because the rate is still sitting where Trump put it (21%) and I thought we were talking about Biden’s promises for his 2024 administration. What do you mean by “happened”?

“Biden caused inflation to go up” was a narrative

Well yeah, but it was a narrative for Trump, not Biden. Also, the narratives I’m talking about are the ones going forward. I think you and I can be in perfect agreement that Biden did a lot that he could point to that should have made him more electable. I’m just saying that isn’t how most voters make their decisions. It absolutely should be, and if voters were that thoughtful then Democrats could probably win every election by pointing out that they are better than Republicans, even if it were only marginally. Campaigns need a dragon and a hero they believe can slay it. Corporate tax rates that are too low are never going to get the traction that “tranies” trying to shower with your kids will. The (perhaps theatrical) language of “taking on corporate criminals” might seem irrelevant, but it’s not.

Most working people made way more even after adjusting for inflation after Biden was done than before.

I really think we are failing to connect here. I absolutely agree that Biden was better than Trump in a myriad of ways. My issue of choice would be the NLRB and the great work they did in making it so much easier to start a union, and so much harder for corporations to union-bust. The problem isn’t what Biden did. I was always going to want him to go further than he did, but he far exceeded my predictions and in the world I want to live in he would have beaten Trump easily. (It’s a little late in the conversation to mention this, but I’m considering the Harris campaign to be a continuation of the Biden campaign to avoid getting lost in the weeds.)

one singular Democrat broke with that, and here you are shitting on him.

I disagree that this is what I’m doing. Also, as much of a positive surprise his presidency was, his rhetoric did not break with that. Even in policy, the flow of money from the bottom to the top was barely slowed.

I couldn’t even find anything in it about student loans.

See “Sec. 220. Nondischargeability of certain educational benefits and loans.” Also, the following is from the Wikipedia entry on BAPCPA.

BAPCPA amended § 523(a)(8) to broaden the types of educational (“student”) loans that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy absent proof of “undue hardship.” The nature of the lender is no longer relevant. Thus, even loans from “for-profit” or “non-governmental” entities are not dischargeable.

Also, you know what Biden is responsible for?

Yes I do, and I spoke to it in another thread. President Biden was a huge improvement over Senator Biden, and I give him full credit for that.

Yes, it was the 2005 bill, and Biden was one of the few Democratic Senators to support and ultimately vote for the bill. He also was also one of the most powerful members of the Senate, not a follower being pulled along.

“Biden was one of the most powerful people who could have said no, who could have changed this. Instead he used his leadership role to limit the ability of other Democrats who had concerns and who wanted the bill softened,” said Melissa Jacoby, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill specializing in bankruptcy.

Biden did make claims that it was a Republican bill that he tried to soften, but nothing in the story of the bill’s authorship or passage supported that. In fact, he was a champion of it’s passage from the start, and had been so twice before when it had been previously proposed. He also helped write a failed bill way back in 1978 that specifically disallowed bankruptcy for student loans.

Biden and Warren debating 2005 bill

Biden also received more campaign donations from the credit industry than any other Senator at the time, and his son Hunter was employed as a $100k/year “consultant” at MBNA.

Biden’s narrative was that we need to have a big raise in corporate taxes, spend almost a trillion dollars finally doing something about climate change, bring domestic manufacturing back to the US and give people working-class jobs again.

That was his sales pitch, and one that I am totally behind, but those are promises, not a narrative. His “big raise” proposal wouldn’t even return rates to where they were before Trump slashed them. Policy promises sell to policy wonks, but most policy wonks are tired of two steps back, one step forward.

When I say narrative, think of a movie plot. Narratives require a hero and a villain. Had Biden framed multinational corporations as the villain, and set himself up as the hero that would take them on, then he would have had a narrative, but that’s not in his nature. (Which is part of what qualified him for establishment and corporate media backing in the 2020 primary.) Biden would have been a perfectly good Democrat back in the 90s when people were a lot more optimistic about their futures, but that was no longer sufficient. In the 2020 general the Republicans handed him a monster to slay in Trump’s complete failure to address the epidemic, but that story was old by the 2024 sequel.

like that inflation was all his fault

Yeah, that was unfortunate and complete bullshit. Whatever philosophical differences I have with Biden, we was certainly a competent manager of the economy. The inflation wasn’t even all that bad, only lasted a couple months, and America kept it lower than anyplace else in the western world. However, a more aggressive and energetic candidate, maybe even a younger Biden, could have gotten that message out. I don’t want to dwell on that too much though, because that’s too specific to the 2024 election. Anyways, there will always be something that goes wrong and hurts an incumbent.

But the Democrats didn’t get this way overnight or by accident. It happened on purpose, through natural selection and legalized bribery and threat.

Yes, a lot of it was externally driven, but it was also a strategy choice going back to right after Republicans embraced the southern strategy. A great easy read on the topic is “Listen Liberal” by Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”. Democrats made a conscious decision to abandon working class Americans in favor of urban professionals. It wasn’t a slow devolution, it was a pivot.

And, also, any time they do do something good, someone like you comes along and makes sure to shit all over it and “call balls and strikes” and try to “put it in context” and try to cancel it back out again.

I guarantee you that Republican voters aren’t listening to someone like me. Also, my language before a general election is quite a bit different than after. This is the time for Democrats to learn and refocus to doing better next time. I don’t compromise my principals before an election, but I spend a lot more time pointing out that whatever flaws the Democrats have, they are miles better than any Republican.

Despite your assumptions, I do a lot of posts defending Biden when he’s being treated unfairly. I also frequently comment about Trump and the Republicans, but not as much because the internet is absolutely flooded with comments like you describe. It just feels redundant to keep pointing out how shitty Trump is. For a while I was pointing out that he was going to be worse than many people expected, but I think the hive mind is pretty much caught up on that now. I also post differently on Lemmy than on other social media. Lemmy is mostly a left leaning space, so there is not as much reason to attack Trump here. On other platforms I spend a whole lot more time debunking Republican lies than anything else.

Have I said anything that’s not true?

I have no particular personal animosity towards Biden or Harris, except perhaps their handling of the 2024 campaign - and I put that way more on Biden than Harris. I do, however, think that Democrats need to accept that they lost to Trump twice now and start grappling with the question of how they failed so spectacularly. It’s easy to blame MAGA and voter apathy, but how does that lead to better outcomes in the future? What led to the sociological problems that gave rise to the far right in the first place? How did a populace that voted in the first black president suddenly become so racist and bigoted again? Maybe we can blame Republican disinformation, but I don’t see that going away any time soon. The question we have to ask is, what did Democrats do, or not do, that contributed or made things easier for the Republicans? That’s the important question, because it’s the one thing Democrats can actually do something about.

If someone in the Democratic party did turn himself on a personal level into something capable of going good things, why would you want to emphasize how shit he was 30 years ago?

Much better than shit is still a far cry from being ready to deal with a rising fascist movement. I knew it would be a disaster the moment Biden won the 2020 primary. Still, he did surprise me in a whole lot of positive ways, and credit where credit is due.

Speaking only of winning elections and nothing else, the problem the Democrats have electorally is that there is no way to package and sell their neoliberalism. To a right minded policy wonk, Democrats are always the right choice, but most voters aren’t policy wonks.

Getting elected requires a strong narrative. The story Democrats offer is “history is over and it’s all minor improvements from here”. That works OK when things are good, but when people are struggling it comes across very differently. Hillary’s “America is already great!” is a perfect example, but she has a real nack for being out of touch. The only time Democrats have a narrative is when Republicans do something awful, which requires Republicans to be in power. This, we keep flipping parties.

Trump’s narrative in 2024 looked a whole lot more like the classic hero’s journey than I have seen in 50 years. Attacked relentlessly from all sides with his demise predicted constantly, he somehow kept moving forward. Meanwhile, I don’t know what the hell to make of Kamala’s story.

The usual split is a lot less dramatic but, Republicans always have a narrative with heroes and villains, and Democrats rarely do. People want to know why productivity goes up and up and life just keeps getting harder. The Republicans offer an answer, it’s the immigrants, or it’s trans people in the showers with your kid, or it’s DEI treating you unfairly. Democrats have a much better and truer answer, but they won’t articulate it because the oligarchs who fund them won’t like it. So, the answer from Democrats is a whimper.

Joe Biden forgave half a trillion dollars worth of student loan debt

President Joe Biden did. Senator Joe Biden was responsible from preventing that debt from being forgiven through bankruptcy. It’s absolutely true that Biden doesn’t get enough credit for his progress as President. It’s also true that certain supporters don’t want him held to account for what he did as a Senator.

All this stuff Trump is now undoing is stuff that Biden did.

Biden was a shitty Senator and a much better President. Trump is a demon from the pits of hell surrounded by much smarter demons than himself and committed to destroying everything good and beautiful in the world.

I think people are still attacking Biden just out of habit at this point.

I’m not attacking anyone, just calling balls and strikes. The rise of fascism today is a direct result of the neoliberalism of yesterday, and the reign of fascism will last until the Democratic party turns into something capable of defeating it. That, and a desire for truth to matter, are what motivates me to speak honestly about Democrats.

That would be relevant if Biden were currently president

LOL, is Reagan currently President? Read what I replied to before telling me if my comment is relevant.

Joe Biden was the Senator most responsible for making those loans undismissible. There is plenty of blame to go around.