Comments by "wvu05" (@wvu05) on "Grading Biden's BIG Time To Shine" video.

@neilarmschlong6315 Hence, "if he keeps this up." 2008 was a dealigning election, because Obama was ultimately unwilling to challenge the orthodoxy of the times. Maybe Biden finally realized what a mistake his old boss made.
2
Maybe we should keep up the pressure so he continues to pleasantly surprise us instead of being such fatalists.
2
@maxkelter3561 Where was this Trump infrastructure bill? I honestly lost track of how many times his people proclaimed Infrastructure Week. I guess it worked on you, kinda like the guy on the bus a few years ago who was disappointed that Trump "declared a national opioid emergency" only to find out later that Trump actually cut funding for treating addiction.
1
4:19 No, Emma, you are not even close. Yes, Justice got elected as a Democrat in 2016, but he switched parties in 2015 and endorsed Trump as the Democratic nominee. He is pretty hard right, and he is just as much of a jerk with his money as Trump (he is the only billionaire in West Virginia). My parents remembered the 2012 heat wave and ensuing blackout where people lost power for days and had to get food because no one's refrigerator worked, and Justice literally paid the electric company to come to his house first out in the middle of nowhere. He is also just as bad as Trump when it comes to stiffing contractors. This is just one of those things where there are strange bedfellows. Either that, or Justice is positioning himself to run against Manchin in 2024.
1
@LinkRocks As long as they keep whining that it needs to be bipartisan, you need to keep the pressure up. Don't let up until it is done.
1
@interdimensionalsteve8172 Indeed. Sometimes, people who claim to be on the left just want to think that you can just have good policy and it will come to be. We will have to use every legal weapon in our legislative arsenal to get to where we need to be.
1
@interdimensionalsteve8172 I'm referring to a subset that thought "We'll just propose good policy and look at top line polls that show that it is at least superficially popular and think I don't need to do anything to get anything accomplished." I saw that time and time again with the Force the Vote crowd. Eventually, it got to the point where I started asking its adherents what they had done to build support for the bill. Other than the people who thought YouTube comments counted as activism or the total marks who counted giving money to Jimmy Dore, only one person had actually done real world organizing. More than one literally said, "It has 2/3 approval, so why should I need to do anything?" Well, if you don't do the work to get it to 218 & 50 where it counts, it doesn't matter if it has 99% approval. There is also the crowd that think that turning the screws a little is just too mean. I'm not saying that Congressional Democrats are savvy at using the levers of power at all. (It seems like a classic case of Battered Spouse Syndrome, which will hopefully go away when the crowd that was there for the Reagan years goes away.) I'm saying it's about time they started
1
@interdimensionalsteve8172 I think I was probably closer to Sam from the beginning that I thought that leverage would have been better served going for something like a committee seat instead of a doomed vote, but it took me a while to realize just how toxic the movement was. We have the dual threat of lazy lefties and scared centrists.
1