I was with this article until the accusation that the Biden admin “stoked tensions” between Russia and Ukraine. It was Putin who invaded Crimea in 2014 and Putin who started backing and staffing separatists in Eastern Ukraine in 2018 and Putin who was talking about getting the USSR back together in 2020 and Putin who massed troops on the Ukrainian border in mid to late 2021, not even a year into the Biden administration.

It’s absolute bullshit to blame those tensions on Biden. Complete brain dead, clownish buffoonery.

You can’t just browbeat people into voting for Biden. Biden has to get people to vote for Biden. To make that happen, he has to do better. For better or worse, it looks like he’ll take the nomination when the convention happens. Its on him now, and its basically out of all of our hands, whether journalist or commentator.

Its on Biden to win this election. He has to make the case for why he is better than Trump. He’s got to go convince the vast majority of non-voters that he’s worth showing up for. Trumps followers will be showing up in force and are as excited as ever to vote.

You can’t just argue someone into being excited to vote for a candidate. Nor can you guilt them or shame them into it either. It doesn’t matter if you personally see it as secondarily important. What matters is how they perceive it. If they see it as a ‘no difference’ or as if ‘my vote doesn’t matter’, or ‘Biden is just as bad’, then you’ve lost.

Biden’s got a tough road to 270. Firstly, he doesn’t have a cult. Second, irl, things were actually better for most people economically under Trump. Its a circumstance of history, but it is what it is. It doesn’t matter why things have gotten worse, it just matters that they have and under whose watch. Then you compound that with Bidens position on Gaza effectively being a complete departure from his base. He’s softened that corner in the most microscopic of ways, but nothing meaningful has changed there. He’s unable to whip Congress into passing his bills. He can’t get them to fully fund Ukraine. The domestic agenda he did go for does almost nothing directly for individuals; if anything the infrastructure bill could hurt him because these projects will just be starting to interrupt traffic around election time, and they’ve all got big signs that say something along the lines of ‘Bipartisan infrastructure bill’, effectively ‘your tax dollars at work’. But legitimately, people might be seeing those signs in November thinking ‘this project made me late to work’. Its not clear that the bill will be making any kind of a difference that peoples lives. And our lives have become objectively worse under Biden. We are making less relative to the cost of things, and that hurts. It happened under Biden, and that’s what people perceive.

I’m not writing Biden out yet, but he’s got a real tough slog ahead of him, that he doesn’t appear to be even starting to work on.