Joe Biden Needs a Sister Souljah Moment

He won the primary based on the belief that he was a Clinton-style centrist, but he refuses to triangulate.

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“You and my husband think so similarly when it comes to politics,” Hillary Clinton once told Joe Biden. “You guys were almost separated at birth.”

It’s interesting to think about how Biden’s first year as president would have gone differently if this were in fact true.

The easiest way to illustrate this is to ask: “Where are the Sister Souljah moments?”

Sister Souljah, a rapper and writer, gained notoriety in 1992 when Clinton, running for president, made a planned attack on her controversial statements about the Los Angeles riots after a jury acquitted police officers in the beating of Rodney King. Wikipedia even has a lengthy “Sister Souljah Moment” entry, defining it as a “politician’s calculated public repudiation of an extremist person, statement, group or position that is perceived to have some association with the politician’s own party.”

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  1. Avatar photo
    David Burke

    “And countless Democratic members of Congress say inflammatory things on a daily basis.”

    Cite please…

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    Ben Connelly

    If Biden were going to have a Sistah Soulja moment he would have done it already. He’s pretty set in his ways at this point.

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  3. Kurt Von Fuchs

    Jonah I love your writing and agree with you and probably 90% of the time and even when I don't agree you make a valid argument. As a true proliferation, I was disappointed dismayed and enraged by the following sentence.
    He even took time off from the trail to oversee the execution of a severely brain damaged inmate, Ricky Ray Rector (Rector actually asked the guards to save his pie until after his execution).
    It's unclear from your writing here whether you think executing mentally retarded people is a good or a bad thing what the actual point of that was, because Bill Clinton's actions in this regard certainly were not tough on crime. A classic WTF moment

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      Ben Connelly

      Yes I was wondering about that sentence too. Pretty sure from hearing Jonah reference this on the Remnant that he’s not in favor of that execution. It’s an example of, “Bill Clinton was so determined to prove he wasn’t a weak-on-crime liberal that he went and did something that would please the most law-and-order Republican.” I find it disturbing that Clinton did that and that that was considered a centrist move in the 90s.

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  4. Raincheck

    The odd thing about Biden being a senator…

    This creature of the Senate didn’t understand that a 50-50 Senate isn’t a mandate for sweeping change. He couldn’t count Senate votes in his own party. He couldn’t craft an agenda that would pass the Senate.

    My conclusion is that the guy just isn’t real competent.

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    Antebellum Whig

    I don't see how anyone who's watched Biden's long career can be very surprised at how his presidency is unfolding

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    Jeff Younger

    Bill Clinton was a political genius. He had innate skills honed to a razor’s edge, and was an expert at altering course to take advantage of shifting political winds. The icing on the cake was his personal charm and likability, even for those who didn’t care for his politics.

    Contrast that with Joe Biden, a thoroughly below-average politician whose only real talent has been longevity in the DC swamp. If Biden ever has an original thought, it will truly be original in every sense of the word.

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  7. Mary Stine

    Harry Truman spent several years in the Senate, was one of the most ignored VP's in history, and yet made a good president. However, Truman had run county road projects and was a judge before he ran for the Senate. He was a farmer and a small businessman and a captain in the US armed forces in WW1. He had a variety of leadership experiences and a well-honed knowledge of human nature. For my money, neither Clinton's time as governor nor Biden's decades in the Senate gave either the depth of knowledge Truman had. (He was also a self taught student of ancient history).
    This is what we are stuck with now: people whose real experience in leadership and governance is essentially shallow because it is so narrow. Trump was a good example of this: his only leadership experience was that of a private businessman and he only related to governing on that understanding.

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  9. Mid R.

    I’ve been surprised by how much Biden vacillates around issues and policies. All politicians do it to some degree but he seems particularly led by the moment, or movement, or the cause rather than being out front with a coherent set of political principles.

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      Jeff Younger

      Biden has made zero attempts to reach across the aisle. It would have been easy to pick off 4-5 moderate GOP Senators (Collins, Romney, Murkowski, Portman, et al) and get major parts of his agenda passed (breaking up BBB which is what they’re being forced to do now in an election year, with dimmer prospects). His tone has been anything but moderate or unifying, which is unfortunate because that’s really what the country needed and would have been a repudiation of Trump’s style of governance. As Rep. Abigail Spanberger said, “nobody elected him to be FDR, they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.” Sure he might have annoyed Bernie and The Squad, but his overall approval would be far higher and the Democrats would be far better positioned for the midterms.

      Don’t get me wrong, I think most of his agenda is diametrically opposed to America’s best interests and I’m not going to shed a tear in seeing it fail. But I would have preferred he made some attempt to bring Americans together, and I’d gladly trade some political losses for a more cohesive society in which the temperature in the room was lowered several degrees. As it stands, we are only gaining cohesion in the general sense that most Americans think Biden is a terrible President who is doing great harm to this nation economically, socially, and on the international stage. I’m not thrilled that my political party is gaining due to America suffering from his poor leadership, yet here we are. I just hope and pray that Trump doesn’t benefit from Biden’s failures. We need a new generation of leadership in both parties.

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          rlritt

          You are so right. What is this crazy agenda that Biden is pushing? And why would any President put down his own party members and side with the opposite party who hates him no matter what he does. Most of the stupid Republicans publically say he stole election. Is he supposed to get on his knees and beg them to like him?

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      rlritt

      I think you're correct and I think making sure Trump doesn't ever, ever get elected should be the number one concern.

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