Joe Biden gets almost no respect, and that really pisses off a large chunk of the Democrat intelligentsia.

Biden, after all, is the most liberal president in…well, forever. Jimmy Carter doesn’t hold a candle to him, whatever conservatives might think. FDR may have been economically more liberal, but Biden has him beat by a country mile when it comes to social radicalism.

Biden is at least as authoritarian as Wilson, with just as much contempt for American founding principles and a much larger federal bureaucracy, and much more power to wield. He is as arrogant as Johnson, with about as much integrity and class.

Along with his liberalism Biden has passed so much major legislation that only FDR exceeds him in modern times, perhaps ever.

Biden, in short, is accomplishing more things on the liberal wish list than any previous president. So why are Americans so unhappy? Why are liberals so unhappy with the president? Intellectuals want to know!

Democrats, Wake the Hell Up! https://t.co/jc2dlTyenQ

— RealClearPolitics (@RealClearNews) June 26, 2023

Even Democrats are unhappy with the president, and that ticks off The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky. His list of Biden’s accomplishments is pretty short, since he only uses them to make his point that Biden has done much yet is in political hot water. But there are plenty of other liberal intellectuals who are happy to list all the major “accomplishments” of Biden, all wrapped up in tidy bows with names like “Build Back Better” and “Inflation Reduction Act.”

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: "[Biden] is, if you will, reimagining how we should build an economy — transforming how an economy should look like." pic.twitter.com/BXCnhpJ455

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 26, 2023

I think that it is fair to say that no president since Lyndon Johnson has gotten so much major legislation passed as Joe Biden. Every president has a signature accomplishment or two–Clinton’s was welfare reform, Bush’s No Child Left Behind, Obama’s was Obamacare, and Trump’s was tax cuts and the booming economy, not to mention Operation Warp Speed.

Biden? His “accomplishments” were bigger or more numerous than the others. Obama reshaped health care for the worse, but Biden has passed more signature legislation than even Barack.

So again, why are so many people unhappy with Biden?

Not surprisingly, it is because Joe Biden has “accomplished” so much. His legislation is driving the country into the ground, and Americans know it.

When somewhere between 86% and 69% of the country–depending upon which poll you look at–think that the country is moving in the wrong direction, it’s not exactly rocket science figuring out why people dislike Joe Biden and want him gone. He is a walking, talking near-corpse with the political acumen of a 2-year-old and the policy instincts of Robespierre.

Passing legislation is not “accomplishing” anything other than exercising raw political power; “accomplishing” things requires…actually accomplishing goals in the real world. And those goals better be good ones.

Joe Biden has made things worse for most Americans, and most Americans–even ones who may vote for him in 2024–know that. The only reason anybody would vote for him is that they hate Republicans with a passion that burns hotter than the sun. Even the people writing these puff pieces about Biden likely know that he has been an awful president–although they like wielding the power and the graft that comes with it.

The only things that liberals really like about Biden are his Ukraine policy, which arguably has been good (and arguably not–Iraq looked like a success until it went to hell), and of course his commitment to alphabet ideology.

Americans are mixed on the first and generally dislike the second.

Biden has been a disaster on the economy, despite the statistics that the White House and Democrats put out. Those jobs he “created” are a lousy bounce back to near pre-pandemic levels (because we shut down the economy, and we still haven’t recovered), and Americans have been feeling the pain of Bidenflation. And when interest rates really hit the pocketbook, the pain will be worse yet.

Americans’ real incomes are substantially down, and you can’t hide that fact.

Just 16% of Americans say they're "better off" financially under Biden, but Karine Jean-Pierre claims "we have the numbers to show that [Biden's] economic policy has indeed worked." pic.twitter.com/pLMwSsxWIJ

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 26, 2023

You can’t tell people they are better off when they know they aren’t. And people are suffering by any measure. People feel less secure, things cost more, and everything looks like it will get worse.

Biden can’t even leave our gas stoves alone!

One irony, of course, is that Democrats don’t understand why FDR’s reputation is so good today. It certainly wasn’t due to his economic successes, because despite his reputation his terms were characterized by disastrous economic growth and pain until World War II forced him to change focus from meddling in the economy to killing Nazis and Japanese Imperials. His reputation is based upon the glow of winning the war and seeming to care for people, but his actual economic record was atrocious.

The Great Depression was by far the longest-lasting economic slump in American history, and Roosevelt had no idea what he was doing. He had the attention span of a toddler when it came to economic policy, and the only reason he is well remembered for his economic policies is that he remained optimistic when things were disastrous. Social Security, of course, was a lasting accomplishment, but almost nobody got it during the Depression. Relief programs looked good, but anybody who has perused the photos of Dorthea Lange, the great photographer of the era, notices just how depressing the reality was.

Amity Schlaes’s book The Forgotten Man is a superb account of just how disastrous FDR’s policies were.

The 50s and 60s were boom years because the shackles placed on the economy during FDR’s presidency were replaced by steadier and smarter economic policies, and for all his foreign policy failures, Kennedy was determined to unleash the economy more than Eisenhower, who was leery of upsetting the applecart. Johnson blew everything up with the twin disasters of the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty, and it took Reagan to get things going again.

Joe Biden’s path is a combination of FDR and Lyndon Johnson–pass major legislation that screws things up big time.

Those are terrible models, although they are the models that intellectuals love the most because they are the result of the deployment of federal powers to beat the economy and people into complying with their terrible ideas.

Back on planet earth: pic.twitter.com/w4PgCJI9DJ

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 26, 2023

It’s no mystery at all why people are unhappy despite Biden’s “accomplishments.”

People are unhappy because of Biden’s “accomplishments.”