Joe Biden Is Not Your New Bicycle - and That's OK
Maybe the best thing is to not be too emotionally invested in your vote for president
Any regular consumer of political news has been deluged with stories recently about traditionally Democratic voting groups who may be ready to defect from Joe Biden in 2024, especially Muslim Americans and young people. It’s mostly about recent events in Israel and Gaza, but the grievances driving this debate have included housing costs, student debt, and climate change. This has produced a good deal of intra-left squabbling on social media, often featuring some version of the following conversation:
Person A: “We won’t forgive Joe Biden, and he shouldn’t expect our votes.”
Person B: “So you’re going to help Donald Trump get elected? The person who is most dangerous to you and everything you value? Great plan.”
Person A: “We’re tired of being told over and over that we have to accept Tweedledee because Tweedledum would be worse. Don’t keep telling us to shut up and get in line. If you want our votes you have to earn them.”
Person B: “You don’t get it.”
Person A: “No, YOU don’t get it.”
I’m not going to try to prosecute one side of this argument. Both sides have some valid points to make, and both perspectives need to be understood. But I do want to suggest a way of thinking about the presidency that might help clarify things.
What if instead of thinking about our vote for president as a profound expression of our innermost self in all its complexity, we think about it as just one piece of our more complex engagement with the political world, and one that doesn’t have to be expressive and inspiring, not because it isn’t important, but precisely because it is?
Your presidential vote doesn’t have to give you a sense of fulfillment and joy. It can be purely instrumental — often, it may be just insurance, contributing to one outcome you’re only partly in favor of to avoid a much worse outcome. Making that choice doesn’t mean you aren’t idealistic or principled, it just means you see politics in a holistic way.
The last thing I want to do is crush anyone’s political idealism, and I understand why many on the left don’t like Joe Biden. His history is problematic in a great many ways. While his embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government and tepid comments about Palestinian human rights after October 7 shouldn't have been surprising to anyone, many still found them justifiably maddening. He’s by nature a compromiser. He made some promises that are unfulfilled. His age — more specifically, the fact that he looks and sounds extremely old, regardless of his actual mental acuity — makes it impossible for many people, especially younger people, to relate to him and have confidence in his ability to serve effectively through a second term.
But I think there’s something else going on among younger voters and their dismissal of Biden: They haven’t yet had the opportunity to have their unreasonably high hopes dashed by a president.
How Barack Obama broke our hearts
If you’re under 30, you may not remember too much about the 2008 campaign, but for many liberals at the time, Obama embodied everything they ever wanted in a presidential candidate. He was young, smart, cool, urban and urbane, multiracial and culturally aware, an extraordinary orator and someone free of personal scandal or, it seemed, a single character flaw. In short, he was the one they had waited their whole lives for, even as he told them “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” That was the core of Obama’s rhetorical magic: He convinced you that you could be an actor in a historic drama, not just an observer but a hero. It was intoxicating.
My favorite manifestation of this feeling was a simple website called Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle. Every time you reload it, it tells you another way Obama lives inside your heart, from “Barack Obama made you a mixtape” to “Barack Obama emailed your dad and told him how great you are.” It was self-aware while still buying into how great it was to finally feel this way about a politician.
At the time, there were very few discouraging words on the left; the feeling was just too powerful. But then reality had its say. The Obama years were filled with unpleasantness — the rise of the Tea Party, the furious racial backlash to the election of a Black president — and Obama himself turned out to be less a revolutionary figure than a rather ordinary Democrat with center-let impulses, one whose practical ambitions never matched the historic sweep of his rhetoric.
To understand why people like me have limits to how disappointed we can be with Joe Biden, and why we’re more pleased with the good things Biden has done than some others might be, you have to grasp both parts of the Obama experience, the initial exuberance and the eventual let-down.
Living with the president’s limitations
I’m sure I’m not the only one who now knows that there will never be a president who fills me with joy and never disappoints me. So while Elizabeth Warren was my favored candidate in the 2020 primaries, I made peace with the idea of Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee and eventual president, despite the many criticisms I had of him over the years.
Accepting the president’s limitations doesn’t mean you stop trying to make the president you have better. In fact, it makes the project more urgent. It’s easy to say “It would be better if we had a different president.” Convincing the president you have to be a better version of themselves is more complicated.
That’s not to say that there’s something wrong with vigorous criticism of the president. That, in fact, is what activists are supposed to do: criticize, cajole, demand, and from time to time, even threaten.
We also shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that progressive activists have accomplished a great deal in the last few years in pushing this administration to the left, which is possible precisely because Joe Biden is an extremely malleable politician. He doesn’t have immovable beliefs; as his party moves, he’ll move. The result is that even for its faults, his has been the most progressive presidency since at least Lyndon Johnson’s, and perhaps even Franklin Roosevelt’s.
It’s not because Joe Biden is a fundamentally progressive guy. It’s because of a combination of historical circumstance, the evolution of the Democratic Party, and the work of left activists who have shown themselves to be both pragmatic and principled. Some of them are members of Congress, some of them serve in the administration, and some of them are outside government. They’ve been deeply engaged with this administration, and to act as though Biden’s policy choices haven’t served a great many progressive goals is to demean their hard work and accomplishments.
I’m not going to run down the list of Biden’s successes on things like climate and debt forgiveness, though it is worth noting one specific that gets less attention: His record on promoting diversity on the federal bench has been nothing short of spectacular, far better than Obama or Bill Clinton. The point is not that it’s good enough and we should all just be celebrating. It’s that when you get a president who is open to influence and progressives work hard to influence them, many good things can happen, even if there are going to be disappointments along the way.
That isn’t an argument against idealism, it’s an argument for not allowing idealism to convince you that politics will ever be uncomplicated. There will be powerful forces arrayed against you, your opponents will not disappear, convincing the public you’re right will be a challenge, and you are unlikely to ever have a president who believes exactly as you do about everything, let alone one who doesn’t disappoint you in many ways.
Because the news media focus so much on the president, we can easily convince ourselves that the most direct thing we do in relation to that individual — cast a vote every four years — ought to be the center of our political engagement just as he is the center of the national political world. But it shouldn’t be. There are a thousand ways to engage with politics, and in many of them you can have a far greater impact than you will with a presidential vote. If Joe Biden has disappointed or angered you, there are a great many ways to make it less likely he will do so in the future. But helping Donald Trump become president (even in the most indirect way) is not one of them.
Some might say that feels like a kind of emotional blackmail. But it’s reality: the 2024 election is going to be very close, and Trump is already making it more than clear that should he win, he plans nothing less than a dismantling of the American political system and replacing it with a right-wing autocracy. We can’t wish that fact away, and we have to make our political decisions in light of it. Even if the better outcome of that contest won’t make us feel great.
In 1968 I was 21 and my political mentor was a work colleague who described herself as a Marxist. At the time of the election everyone I knew was furious at Hubert Humphrey because of his support of the Vietnam War. I didn't have a vote to throw away since I wasn't yet a citizen, but all my friends were adamant that they wouldn't support Humphrey. I talked to my Marxist friend who said that of course she was going to vote for Humphrey. "I have two words, for you," she said, "Supreme Court.' Those nine old men will have more effect on your life than any president." It's the best political advice I've ever received.