Biden Voters, do you regret your vote for Biden? (1 Viewer)

[moleculo]

I think regulatory agencies bear the burden of the blame here. FEMA with Katrina. The SEC with Bush and Obama and the financial crisis. The WHO, CDC, and FDA with COVID. Now the FDA with baby formula. It seems like bureaucrats and experts making decisions with a slavish response to procedure and protocol is a large part of the problem. Blaming the executive seems like a cheap political jab when it happens, but the truth is that the executive branch oversees these agencies. The buck ends with the executive branch. 

I don't particularly get worked up about President Biden and his efficacy regarding baby formula nor do I worry about where the buck stops. What I do question is the structure and oversight of the agencies in question. I think we have ossified and unwieldy bureaucracies in America right now. To paraphrase Fukuyama, the people don't care if the power is derived from the legislature or the executive, they just want government that works. In our century, we've seen the legislature pass the solutions to problems to the executive agencies, who then botch the implementation of any solution to a problem. 

That's the problem. It's that the agencies tasked with solving the problems don't work. 
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I get your point about federal agencies and agree with it 100%.  But Biden also had a role to play here.  This wasn't some minor issue that got lost in the federal bureaucracy.  Babies were dying, and the nation's infant food supply was at risk. And the issues here fell squarely in the Executive Branch and the duties of the President.

As I said in my prior posts, this was a smoldering fire in FDA dating all the way back to September, 2021, and it's hard to believe Biden wasn't advised on any of this back then.  Biden's own HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a CNN interview that the "FDA has kept me apprised of this from LAST YEAR. We have been moving as quickly as we can".  If he's telling the truth, then Biden was certainly advised of this in some capacity last year.  But let's assume the worst and that the FDA and HHS never communicated any of this to Biden or White House staff.  We know for certain that Biden knew about it on February 17th when the plant closed.  Yet he didn't say one word about it until May 13th, and apparently he only did so then because "all of a sudden it's on the front page of every newspaper",   When asked if he should have acted sooner,  he said "if we had been better mind readers, I guess we could've."  Read any leadership book and this will be in the chapter of "what not to say."  Ironically one of the best takedowns on Biden's poor response to this issue was a piece from MSNBC.

All of this can be boiled down to the following - Biden had 3 months (and likely longer) to deal with an impending shortage of baby formula.  When it finally became a crisis in May, he magically found several things that could be done to help resolve the issue.  As far as I can tell, these solutions could have been implemented months earlier and the entire May crisis averted.

IMO this is all very fair criticism.

ETA: bureaucracies not functioning well is not unique to Biden.  He has not made government run more smoothly and we would be better off with a better hand on the wheel.  That being said, given the choices in 2020 I vote Biden 10 of 10 times.

 

[rockaction]

Unlike what Obama received?  Really?  He wasn't painted as some radical because of Reverend Wright?  His citizenship wasn't called into question?

What Im trying to say here...is that Trump was the outlier as far as how nasty things got.  What Romney got was in line with similar candidates from the right and left over the years.

No, not really, but you'll see it your way, I suppose. 

 

[sho nuff]

No, not really, but you'll see it your way, I suppose. 

I was not even an Obama voter...but he was hit pretty damn hard in the media and by the other candidates.

Trump was the outlier...but I don't think he will be anymore.  Media and candidates will get nastier and nastier as we have seen it does not seem to turn off the electorate much when it comes to dirt.

 

[IvanKaramazov]

I think regulatory agencies bear the burden of the blame here. FEMA with Katrina. The SEC with Bush and Obama and the financial crisis. The WHO, CDC, and FDA with COVID. Now the FDA with baby formula. It seems like bureaucrats and experts making decisions with a slavish response to procedure and protocol is a large part of the problem. Blaming the executive seems like a cheap political jab when it happens, but the truth is that the executive branch oversees these agencies. The buck ends with the executive branch. 

I don't particularly get worked up about President Biden and his efficacy regarding baby formula nor do I worry about where the buck stops. What I do question is the structure and oversight of the agencies in question. I think we have ossified and unwieldy bureaucracies in America right now. To paraphrase Fukuyama, the people don't care if the power is derived from the legislature or the executive, they just want government that works. In our century, we've seen the legislature pass the solutions to problems to the executive agencies, who then botch the implementation of any solution to a problem. 

That's the problem. It's that the agencies tasked with solving the problems don't work. 

This, exactly.  Everybody wants to blame the president (when the other team is in charge) or defend the president at all costs (when their team is in charge).  In the meantime, the non-partisan federal bureaucracy keeps failing over and over again, and nobody cares because there are no partisan points to be gained or lost on that front.  It's infuriating.

Forget about partisan politics or ideology for a moment, and imagine that we somehow lived in a country that didn't have an interstate highway system.  Does anybody really think that the US would be capable of building the interstate system today if we had to do it from scratch?  I don't.  

 

[Godsbrother]

I've never been a Biden fan and almost two years in he has been pretty unimpressive.   He has done things that I support:  Getting out of Afghanistan, even as ungracefully as it was, was the right call.  I think he has handled the Russian invasion of Ukraine very well, and passage of the infrastructure bill was a positive.

Immigration is a mess but it has been for decades and I certainly don't think throwing out Dreamers, building a wall or separating immigrant children from their parents was the answer. 

I am not sure how much control the president has over oil prices and inflation but it is has been an unmitigated disaster.  Biden is the guy in charge so he gets the blame. I do think things will make a slow recovery but the Dems are going to lose big time in the mid-terms so I don't hold out much hope for the Biden administration's next 2 years.

That said, knowing what I know now I would still gladly vote for Biden over the cheating, sore loser, traitorous crybaby we had in office before him.  If the Republicans get their butts out of their heads and put up a candidate that isn't Trump or a Trump wannabe they will have my vote in 2024. 

 

[lazyike]

You really are lazy 

Surgeons wear N-95 masks.  America was using cheap paper masks, most of which were made in China.  Or pieces of cheap cloth they could pull up over their face when required.  Most weren't even pulling them over their nose.

Even the CDC said they don't work.  Pretty easy to look up lazy 

So you think if there were no n-95 masks available that surgeons wouldn't wear whatever mask they could find? Let's get real. Yes there were plenty of jerks who didn't put the masks over their nose and at airports and on the few plane trips I was on flight attendants were reminding individuals that weren't wearing their mask properly to get them up over their noses.

 

[nysfl2]

Sure...but the idea that Harris and Biden were against the Vaccine until Trump lost...vs their full actually words which were to fight against Donald Trump pushing that he could deliver it before the election even...but that they would ultimately trust the doctors if they said it was safe.

Yes - this whole narrative is the epitome of taking a portion of what people like Harris said out of context and pushing it as a narrative over and over again until people believe it. No democratic politician ever said that they wouldn't take the vaccine once it had been through the full FDA approval process - they just said that if Trump forced the FDA to approve the vaccine before it had been through the full approval process, they wouldn't take it.

 

[timschochet]

This, exactly.  Everybody wants to blame the president (when the other team is in charge) or defend the president at all costs (when their team is in charge).  In the meantime, the non-partisan federal bureaucracy keeps failing over and over again, and nobody cares because there are no partisan points to be gained or lost on that front.  It's infuriating.

Forget about partisan politics or ideology for a moment, and imagine that we somehow lived in a country that didn't have an interstate highway system.  Does anybody really think that the US would be capable of building the interstate system today if we had to do it from scratch?  I don't.  

Again I want to stress that while it’s true that these agencies are failing, they are failing to deal with emergency, crisis situations. The tone of your posts on this subject had been that these agencies are failures as a general rule, and this is NOT the case. They are effective, important, and we’re better off with them. They’re just not good in emergencies, but this can be fixed. 

 

[moleculo]

Again I want to stress that while it’s true that these agencies are failing, they are failing to deal with emergency, crisis situations. The tone of your posts on this subject had been that these agencies are failures as a general rule, and this is NOT the case. They are effective, important, and we’re better off with them. They’re just not good in emergencies, but this can be fixed. 

IMO criticism of regulatory agencies is 100% fair.  @IvanKaramazov is right to call them out, but let's not toss the baby with the bathwater.  They do a lot of good too.  

Specifically, I don't believe the formula crisis can be laid at the foot of the FDA.  It's not really the FDA's responsibility to ensure demand is met - their task is to ensure products are safe.  Sure, they could have acted sooner in getting Abbott to clean up their act, but that just means the shortage would have happened sooner. 

The root cause of the shortage, IMO, is a miscommunication between the FDA and US Customs and Border Protection - reduce tariffs, issue temporary labeling waivers, etc. That's the kind of thing that Congressmen can make happen, and if they don't the President can definitely get done.

Somehow a signal should have gone up to give advanced warning that there would be a shortage.  I'm not sure where that signal should come from.  Retailers?  Consumer advocacy groups?  Trade associations?   How is this supposed to work?

I have a real hard time imagining that inventory levels of infant formula is the kind of thing that typically makes it into Presidential Daily Briefings until it's crisis level...that's why I struggle to pin this on Biden himself.

 

[The Commish]

The root cause of the shortage, IMO, is a miscommunication between the FDA and US Customs and Border Protection

The root cause of the shortage was a company deciding that it was ok to have a single point of failure in their supply chain.  

 

[the rover]

The root cause of the shortage was a company deciding that it was ok to have a single point of failure in their supply chain.  

That and allowing a near monopoly on a critical product.

 

[The Commish]

That and allowing a near monopoly on a critical product.

1 and 2 on my list for sure.