I believe that history will view Joe Biden's term as president more positively than it is viewed today. There was a glaring hole in his resume from a progressive perspective--his response to concerns about Israeli genocide in Gaza, which ranged from apathy to antipathy--but Joe Biden did surround himself with competent bureaucrats. While inflation was a problem, most economic indicators improved, and while some of this was somewhat inevitable, the successful distribution of COVID-19 vaccines were a big part of why. After years of Donald Trump ignoring environmental issues, the Biden administration brought social responsibility back to the forefront, notably bringing the United States back into the Paris Climate Accords.
By many metrics, Joe Biden had a successful term, or at least he did not have an actively unsuccessful one. But by the standard that he himself set out--to put Donald Trump in America's regrettable past, to heal the soul of the nation, to serve as a transitional candidate to the next generation of progressive leadership--Joe Biden was a massive failure.
I am going to say something that is going to sound downright offensive at first, but I am asking you to hear me out--the conservatives who accused Kamala Harris and Kentaji Brown Jackson of being "DEI hires" as vice president and Supreme Court associate justice have a point. To be clear, this does not mean that either was unqualified for their positions: Harris had an extremely normal resume for a presidential candidate and thus for a vice presidential candidate (and eventually for a presidential candidate again), and Brown Jackson had a long legal career that eventually led to a spot on the second-highest court in the United States before then being nominated for a spot on the highest. The issue is that Joe Biden openly said that he was pursuing a woman of color for each of these positions. Both choices may have been fine-to-good, but announcing his stage directions put both women in an unenviable task of appearing chosen to fill a quota.
The solution here should have been simple--Biden should have said that he was going to consider a wide range of candidates from a wide variety of backgrounds, choose the best person available, and then chosen Kamala Harris and Kentaji Brown Jackson. But Joe Biden's lack of communication instincts became his great political weakness. Even when he did things well, he could not explain himself. The most famous example of this, of course, was his 2024 debate with Donald Trump which for all intents and purposes forced the informal referendum that forced him to step aside from the 2024 Democratic nomination.
Donald Trump has always had a remarkable ability to be simultaneously a massive liar and somebody who is able to communicate an aura of sincerity to his supporters. Joe Biden was the inverse of this, and it is arguably the primary reason that Donald Trump, who ran an objectively terrible campaign (he constantly brought conversations back to complaining about the 2020 election, the single least popular thing about him), is president today. Donald Trump lies about his accomplishments--by the end of 2026, I assume he will be claiming that he has ended several million wars--but when he does accomplish something, you will hear about it. Joe Biden didn't put his name on stimulus checks to Americans, Donald Trump did, and more Americans remember the Trump checks than the Biden ones.
There are some things that Donald Trump does very well as a political communicator. He has demonstrated a sense of humor (I would note that the same thing could be said about vice president-era Joe Biden). He knows how to excite his supporters while giving speeches. These are not inherently bad qualities--being able to excite one's supporters would come across much more pleasantly if the things his supporters wanted to hear weren't usually racism or misogyny against his political opponents. There will periodically be calls for a "Trump of the left", and some cannot look past how Trump makes them feel personally to understand that "Trump of the left" doesn't mean "be more racist". It doesn't mean finding a billionaire and/or celebrity. It doesn't, despite Gavin Newsom's best efforts, mean doing an SNL-like impression of Trump's bits.
I tend to find myself defending Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign. I do believe that she was put in a nearly impossible situation--elevated to the top of the ticket by absolute political necessity--and that had Joe Biden remained in the race, not only would he also have lost but that his performance would have been so poor that it would have caused Democrats to fare worse in congressional and other down-ballot races. But the core flaw of her campaign was an inability to articulate a vision for the future. Partly she was hamstrung by her position in the Biden administration--her infamous inability to answer what she would have done differently than Joe Biden on The View was a reflection of a small-c conservatism within the Democratic Party. Donald Trump offered specific promises--they were mostly lies, but there was an ambition there that excites people. In a better world, the skills that make one a good president and the skills that make one a good public communicator would seen as unrelated, but that is not the reality of the present.
A little over a year into Donald Trump's second term as president, he is unpopular on every issue. Some of these were inevitable--even at the peaks of his 2024 popularity, voters hated where he stood on abortion and on re-litigation of the 2020 election, for instance. But immigration enforcement was supposed to be one of his strengths, and it almost immediately became a massive liability. And it is an indictment of the Democratic political machine that they were unable to make immigration a winning issue for them before it was too late. Republicans accused Democrats of wanting open borders, and because Democrats did not push their own message, this was what defined them. Now, I'd rather have totally open borders than the current policy of guns-blazing raids of peaceful immigrant populations, but I understand why this would not be ideal politically either. So how about "Illegal immigration should be handled as a civil matter rather than a criminal one, and the Stephen Miller strategy of creating quotas for how many people to deport treats what should be a boring technical matter as a loud, dumb game"?
The most impressive political candidate of the Democratic Party in 2025 was now-New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Constitutionally ineligible to serve as president, as he was not born in the United States. But just because Mamdani cannot become president doesn't mean that his political strengths have not been explored as a potential roadmap for the party as a whole. Some have turned his political messages into a reductive version of it--Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who refused to endorse Mamdani for mayor even after Mamdani won his party's nomination, has essentially learned the lesson to just say "affordability" repeatedly, as though saying it three times in a row will cause prices to go down. But this was a sensible political strategy specifically because of what job Mamdani was pursuing--mayor of the most notoriously expensive city in the country.
One of Mamdani's earliest notable endorsements came from New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Like Mamdani, the representative typically known by her three initials has been noted for her youthful enthusiasm. Like Mamdani, AOC has cultivated a wing of those who are utterly terrified of them. But these wings have come from a group of voters that are roughly as likely to vote for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as they are to vote for Bernie Sanders, or Kamala Harris, or Joe Manchin. In the contemporary political climate, there is not going to be a single unified candidate that all Americans can agree is fundamentally decent--the guy who inspired "Let's go Brandon" chants was supposed to be that guy. If not him, than whom?
But what AOC can do that Joe Biden famously could not do, or would not do, is articulate why she believes what she believes. This week alone, she has spoken with moral clarity about issues ranging from AI deepfake pornography to medical costs. She has not only weighed in the presence of ICE in Minneapolis and the cost of living in America, but has effortlessly tied the two topics together, observing in a social media-friendly short video that there is a direct connection between funding of brazen ICE overreach and the defunding of health care subsidies for working class-to-impoverished Americans. She does not make a decision between arguing against immigration enforcement efforts on moral grounds and arguing against it on financial grounds--she explains in a few seconds why these are both part of the same rotten system.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a lightning rod since before she even entered Congress, having launched to fame via unseating a not-exactly-conservative Democratic incumbent in 2018. She almost immediately became a frequently cited bogeyman by Republican politicians. But despite seeming like a far-left outlier from a deep-blue district when she was first elected, she has played the game of Democratic politics while still being unapologetically true to her own politics. She was an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter in 2020 (I would argue that, as a woman of color, she helped bridge the gap between Bernie's overwhelmingly white and male, largely just anti-Hillary Clinton 2016 coalition and his far more positive and demographically diverse 2020 one) who became a valuable Joe Biden surrogate once the primaries were over. In a party dominated by an obsession with dying linear forms of infotainment like Meet the Press appearances, AOC has regularly hosted Twitch streams where she would, say, play Madden with Tim Walz while still advocating for her worldview. For as exhausting as the "Should Kamala Harris have gone on Joe Rogan?" news cycles of late 2024 were, it's a valid question, along with whether she would have been good at it. I personally think she would have done just fine. But I know Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would do well, because she's been doing well.
By 2028, AOC will have been in Congress for nearly a decade, even if, at 39, she would be the youngest elected president ever--we would go from only having one president who was (barely) younger than my parents to having one younger than I am. She would have critics, sure, but she would also be able to capture the excitement that her and my generation felt as teenagers with the rise of Barack Obama.
The idea that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is too far left to be a viable presidential candidate will be discussed--I would argue that this is not a disqualifier to run for president but rather the sort of thing that will sort itself out during the primaries. Maybe she is. But polling repeatedly shows that the Democratic Party is repeatedly to the right of the American public as a whole, and way to the right of its base. AOC is not a stubborn ideologue who will not settle for anything less than the abolition of ICE, but rather a practical but sincere political communicator who understands that speaking with moral clarity rather than immediately trying to compromise one's principles for some artificial sense of moderation is how to achieve genuine progress. Would President Ocasio-Cortez abolish ICE? She might try, but she probably wouldn't pull it off. But by treating this as not only a possibility but as something worthy of consideration on its merits, she could impact real, substantial change. No matter what you call it.
When Renee Good was killed in Minneapolis seventeen long days ago, I knew that my congresswoman, Ann Wagner, was going to avoid commenting on the matter, as the Republican representative in the closest thing Missouri has to a purple district who understands that her best way to survive in both primaries and general elections is to make absolutely no noise. I knew that my senators, if they weighed in, were going to say something asinine. Even Wesley Bell, the nearby Democratic representative who has been subject to many justifiable critiques but whose politics are certainly much more closely aligned with mine than just about any other politician in the state, was never going to communicate in a way that felt like it conveyed my own sentiments. The only elected official whose statements I cared about were from the representative in a New York district that I've only barely set foot in before. And I know I'm not alone. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, like all congresspeople, represents between 700,000 and 750,000 constituents, but unlike every other member of the body, AOC represents the beliefs and hopes of many, many millions. She should be the next Democratic nominee for president.
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