Joe Biden: The Boring Old White Guy We Need Right Now

We deserve so much more, but he’s still better than the alternative.

Joe Biden has been a pretty boring president compared to his predecessor. Much of the controversy around his job performance to date has been drummed up by an opposition that is hell-bent on replacing him with a fascist theocratic regime headed by a conman. Most of what he has been doing is just managing the government and doing post-45 damage control.

His approval rates reflect this reality — the progressives aren’t thrilled with his lack of action on a lot of things and his too-little approaches to others, and the right-wing will never approve of him, and as such he’s not doing the best. However, the slow, steady, boring approach to the presidency is, in my opinion at least, kinda what we need right now.

Obama tried to be a uniter with a dynamic, collaborative approach to the presidency. He was young and promised a lot, but ultimately didn’t (or couldn’t) deliver many of his promises. It certainly didn’t help that the right wing, particularly the racist and bigoted right-wingers, did everything they could to oppose him.

On the other hand, he could’ve been a bit more forceful in his approach rather than trying to work with people who would never even give him the time of day. The result was a bit of a messy presidency with a handful of notable accomplishments and a legacy of being obstructed by a stubborn right.

Trump, however, was a wrecking ball, dismantling or destroying so many of the guardrails and traditions that are hallmarks of the presidency. His ultimate goal was to be the king of America, the man with the vote so to speak. He wound up doing loads of damage to the office of the presidency, the bureaucracy around the presidency, and democracy as a whole. The fact that he is still relevant in politics is frightening.

Joe Biden, following up the confrontational Obama presidency and the disastrous Trump years, has so far been a fairly quiet, mediocre old white dude. He hasn’t done a ton of notable things; rather, he’s mostly kept his head down and tried to put the pieces of his office back together after his predecessor broke as much as possible on his way out.

Biden will likely be remembered as a fairly average president achievement-wise, not terribly notable aside from who he came after and how he handled that. Had he been elected following a more traditional 45th president, he would be largely forgotten to the annals of history with the likes of Millard Filmore and James Polk.

Considering his position in the order of recent presidents — following Bush the younger, Obama, and Trump — it’s kind of nice to have a bit of a boring old white dude after those three.

Bush the younger will be forever associated with the War on Terror and its eventual fallout in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as for being a war criminal.

Obama will be remembered as the first black president who accomplished some cool stuff despite opposition, but who ultimately wasn’t the transformational leader that he was talked up as (and who also was a war criminal).

Trump will be remembered as a proto-fascist, and whether we retain our democracy or not will affect whether that’s seen as good or bad.

Biden, on the heels of all of that nonsense, is someone who I desperately hope continues to be a boring, mediocre, put-your-head-down-and-do-it kind of president. I hope he has a decent if somewhat uneventful presidency for the remainder, I hope he is succeeded by a young progressive who will kick ass and take names, and I hope that America doesn’t fall to Trumpist fascism.

The American government is currently dominated by boomers. Joe Biden is a prototypical boomer Democrat who is fighting a bunch of boomer Republicans who, as far as I can tell, have sold their souls for power. Right now, I feel like they all need to retire to a farm somewhere and live out the rest of their days with no influence on politics. Let Gen X and millennials take the reins now.

As I have said several times, Joe Biden is the president we need right now, even if we deserve better. Just a boring, mediocre old white dude who is a lifelong politician. His massive experience in working in politics will help him reassemble some of the broken pieces of democracy; the fact that he’s a straight white octogenarian career politician will hopefully “reboot” some things and help set things back on some sort of normal path.

Do we deserve better? Absolutely. What we deserve is an Obama 2.0, who will kick ass, take names, and put America on a track to actually compete with most of Europe in terms of serving its citizens. We deserve a president that will drive all the racists, bigots, fascists, and theocrats back under the rocks that they crawled out of. We deserve someone who understands how important the democratic process is and understands that the American experiment is something that should be respected, not spit upon by Trump and those who would follow him.

Unfortunately, but also thankfully, what we have is Joe Biden: boring old white guy. I could not be more thrilled right now. He’s doing things by degrees, getting the country back on some sort of normal track, and not making too many wild headlines. The fact that I can wake up and not read a headline about how the president tweeted top-secret information at 3 a.m. is so, so nice that I can’t even begin to describe how awesome it feels.

If you would’ve told me in 2012 that in ten years, I would be absolutely thrilled to have a boring 80-year-old white guy as president, I would’ve laughed at you. Surely we’d have another groundbreaker — a woman, another person of color, someone who isn’t a Christian in some way or another. And, while technically I think that Trump worships no god but himself, I am stoked that in this, the year of our lord 2022, we have an old, straight, white, Catholic man as our president.

We deserve so much better, but if you can’t always get what you want, sometimes you get what you need.

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Here’s another bit about good ol’ Joe: