Well, I was one of those people, and obviously I was wrong. It's worth stopping to reflect on how my expectations got off track.
Biden has been a national political figure for literally my entire life. He was running for president when I was in high school. He is a known commodity, like soybeans or American cheese. He's always been a centrist on domestic policy and firmly planted in the consensus school of foreign policy. Do I agree with him on every issue? No of course not. But in policy terms is pretty much down the fairway. If a person was looking for a return to normalcy, Biden seemed like he would be quite possibly the single most reliable choice imaginable.
Biden has also always been good on "norms." This is hard to quantify because it's only become an issue fairly recently, but Biden seemed like a guy who wouldn't try to blow up the senate or supreme court if he didn't get his way on some policy or another. In fact, the idea of Biden taking dynamite to any of these institutions seemed kind of unthinkable.
Where I should have seen warning signs was during the campaign, when Biden was totally MIA. At the time, I thought this was a shrewd campaign strategy. Keep Biden off the stage, eliminate the possibility of a stupid gaffe (the kind that Biden is famous for), and just make the election a referendum on Trump. Makes sense, no problem. Now it's obvious that the reason why Biden didn't campaign is because he couldn't. Quite a few right-wingers were saying this during the campaign. They were right and I was wrong.
Also, I was assuming that Biden's cabinet would be made up of other centrist old-hands and that his style of government would follow accordingly. Instead, it feels like his administration is being run by 20-somethings from Twitter and he's just along for the ride.
Maybe I'm misreading all of this. That would be great because it would mean there's a possibility for Biden to turn things around. But I suspect he's not able to do so because he's just not up for the job anymore.
This is how I see a lot of it as well.
Especially the campaign stuff. I thought he was playing "rope a dope" and thought my conservative friends were being dumb in railing on him not getting out of the basement. I'm sure there was some of that "Let Trump make the unforced errors" / "don't risk throwing a pass when you have a big lead" element. But I missed on this.