VP Joe Biden shaking my hand in 2010 in Tacoma

 

I predicted last year that the Biden-Harris administration would be more progressive than most people even dared dream.

 

Turns out I was more right than even I dared dream, and I’m super happy about that.

 

Joe Biden is sounding, every day, more and more like a well-mannered Bernie Sanders.

 

Now, make no mistake: Bernie Sanders has always been far more well-mannered than I would be in his position.  But he has cornered the market on righteous anger and indignation.

 

He’s a curmudgeon.  A delightful, wonderful curmudgeon, but a curmudgeon nonetheless.

 

And that’s the only thing that has ever grated on me about him.

 

I get it. And I get him.

 

I’m pretty curmudgeonly myself when it comes to policy matters. What’s right to do is what’s right to do, and I get aggravated and frustrated when not everyone believes as I do on matters of policy.

 

I LOVE Bernie Sanders with all my heart. He says what I feel as well as I could myself on policy matters.

 

And I love Joe Biden and Kamala Harris with all my heart.  They aren’t carbon copies of each other, by any means, but they’re out there on the front lines driving the bus more or less in the same direction, which is good — and a very far cry from what has been happening since 1980.

 

What I love most about Joe Biden is that he doesn’t ruffle feathers when he communicates, and he mandates civil, respectful discourse from everyone in his administration.

 

Equally attractive is that he always comes across as reasonable and knowledgeable, so it’s easy to believe he knows how to negotiate with friend and foe responsibly (without giving up too much of what working class Americans need in efforts to appease unappeasable politicians).

 

Joe doesn’t call every GOP representative a foe. He doesn’t vilify or berate. So, I can see why both sides of the aisle like him, even though his policies aren’t the GOPs (by a long shot).

 

Take a look at the transcript from his most recent speech to Congress.  It’s a masterpiece.

 

Or better yet, listen to it on YouTube. 

 

After hearing it in real time, the follow on GOP response to what Biden proposed was almost laughable if it wasn’t so tragic and untrue. It was yet another attempt to kowtow to its  base of low information/undereducated voters.

 

As far as I can tell, the only Republicans who vilify Biden these days are the ones who helped incite, or vicariously supported, the insurrection that occurred on January 6th in our nation’s Capitol. Liz Cheney, Jeff Flake, former POTUS George W. Bush, and others have denounced the vilification of the Biden-Harris administration, even though they disagree on many of its policies.

 

But MOST rank and file Republican voters are on board with the vast majority of Biden’s proposals and actions to date, which is why White House Spokesperson Jan Psaki can claim (with facts to back it up) that Biden’s policies are widely embraced in a bipartisan way.  The administration realizes that the GOP gang on Capitol Hill (occupying a single zip code) isn’t reflecting the needs and desires of their constituencies in the states they are supposed to be representing.

 

100 days in on this new administration, I am very much loving what I’m seeing.  If they’d just come around to Medicare for All, lowering the eligibility age for it, and adding dental, hearing and eye care to it, I’d be deliriously happy.  Right now I’m just super happy that my prophecy about Joe Biden’s time in office is well on its way to being fulfilled.

 

This will be a wildly consequential administration.  If it succeeds at what it’s proposing and enacting, Joe Biden will be thought of as the 21st Century’s FDR, a president so popular that they passed term limits to keep popular presidents from becoming office holders for as long as the people continued to vote them into office. He was a president the people loved and the corporations and oligarchs hated.

 

I hope Joe finds that an attractive legacy.  I’d love to see him lionized as a president who had the backs of laborers and breadwinners when they needed a champion most.

 

Hope realized is a beautiful thing!