I am a Joe Biden super fan, which makes me a weirdo – again. You don’t find a lot of super-enthusiastic Joe Biden people. I’m not sure why. I mean, come on! He’s exciting. Yet, the general feeling amongst Democrats about a 2024 re-election campaign is, “Well, okay.” On the other side, Republicans can only muster a lack-luster, “Boo.”

To perk this race up, I will give you the Top 10 reasons why Joe Biden should be President for life, or until the end of a second term, whichever should come first.

Reason No. 10 Joe Biden should run again

He ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan.

I agreed with President Obama when he said in 2008 that we took our eyes off Afghanistan, which was home base for Al-Qaeda, the launching pad for the 9/11 attacks, and we focused on Iraq. That turned out to be unnecessary. But despite an investment in Afghanistan that would go on, and on, and on, and on, it never stabilized.

It wasn’t until Joe Biden, the fourth president during the Afghanistan conflict, came in that we withdrew troops. That was August of 2021, within months of the 20th anniversary of the Afghanistan war, making it by far and away the longest war in US history.

To do that – I don’t think everyone remembers this, oh, how short our memories are – he had to rebuff both the military hawks and the progressives. The hawks still thought that we were going to be able to wipe out the Taliban. The progressives had to come to believe that Afghanistan was sort of a world making project. We were going to totally reform Afghanistan culture, starting with women’s rights. They really didn’t want to back out because they thought they were almost there.

The result was a very messy exit. It was not good footage. Nonetheless, we’re gone now. And we are still dealing with the hangover from the war. Of course, the cost includes the troops we lost, the folks who fought there for years and wonder what it was all for, and culturally, the lasting changes to our society.

Even now we are debating the ubiquitous AR-15, a type of rifle designed for military use. A whole generation of American veterans learned to shoot and to operate on AR-15 rifles. And that technology has since moved on into hunting and sport shooting and everything else. At the same time, we deal with gun violence. That combination has really clouded our culture, I think, and made political conversations more difficult. It’s just one of the many, many lasting legacies of the war in Afghanistan.

I want to be clear that I’m passing no judgment on anyone who served there. I’m just saying that the number of politicians who want to go back = zero. The number of Americans who wake up thinking, “Man, if only we’d given it a little bit more” = more than zero. But not much more.  

It was time to withdraw. Joe Biden did it. It’s done. It is an accomplishment so thorough and relieving that we don’t think about anymore.

Reason No. 9 Joe Biden deserves a second term

He wears sunglasses while he eats ice cream.

Honestly, if that’s his shtick, aren’t we willing to take that? I think we remember the unbelievable amount of media attention Donald Trump was able to earn. He worked very hard on it, and it was usually through outrageousness. Or you can go back to the days of Barack Obama in which – wait, Donald Trump was also on TV going after Barack Obama!

Joe Biden’s been media savvy in a way that people don’t appreciate. Frankly, his work to define the opposition as “MAGA Republicans” or “extreme MAGA Republicans” has been stickier than the Republican’s “Let’s go Brandon.”  People have not been able to box Biden in on anything but his age (a numerical fact Joe doesn’t care to debate). Instead, he has been boxing in the opposition on their policies, which means he’s a very good politician.

I think that he has been effective in driving distance between moderate GOP folks and the far-right wing. You saw that at the State of the Union address this year, where he got into a live debate with some of the rowdy members of the Republican caucus and used it to his advantage. And if that’s sort of a soft, subjective thing, then I give you the hard quantitative facts of the midterms, which by any account looked like they were going to be a wipe out for the Democrats. Historically, they should have been a wipe out for the Democrats. Yet the Senate stayed in Democratic hands and the MAGA Republicans (to use Joe Biden’s term) lost to Democratic moderates.

Reason No. 8 Joe Biden should stay president

He believed Russia was going to invade Ukraine before President Zelenskyy did.

Let us not forget that Joe called it and called it again, even when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told him to calm down. I looked this up, January 28th, 2022, prior to the Russian invasion. Zelenskyy literally was speaking out in public asking Biden to calm down, don’t make this dramatic decision to pull US diplomats out of Kiev.

He suggested Joe Biden was overplaying the situation. I think you can see now in retrospect, not only did Joe Biden call it, but that he’s been very firm in his support of Zelenskyy and Ukraine. That is all to the good. He is effectively draining Russian resources, making Ukraine a quagmire for a global opponent of the United States. And he’s done it without putting any US boots on the ground. Well done.

Reason No. 7 we need Joe Biden to stick around

Joe Biden knows how to pick a fight effectively.

That is, when the feds have the power, when his branch of government has the power, he’s offered moderate adjustments that most folks are probably good with.

For example, in marijuana, he pardoned all prior federal offenses for simple possession of marijuana. And he’s starting to review how marijuana is scheduled because right now it is a Schedule 1 drug under the same classification as heroin and LSD. At this point, most of us think that that’s not good. Joe’s not legalizing it – not that he could unilaterally – but he is ratcheting it down in a way with which I think most folks agree. When I say “most folks,” I mean just about all Democrats and a good share of Republicans.  That’s a good call.

He’s playing a strong hand. It’s easier when you have the power to loosen up a bit, like he’s doing, than it is to try and assert power you don’t have.

Another example is dealing with trans athletes in sport. He has a proposal under Title IX, which would stop schools and colleges from outright banning transgender athletes, but would allow teams to create some limits to ensure fairness. 

This, again, is where most people are at. We have very extreme polarization on what seems like a very new and complex situation for the public to deal with. Sixteen states have straight-up banned trans athletes. Like it was a major threat to women’s sports. As if a lot of men would say they identify as women now, just to go get the gold medal on the girls team. Which I don’t think is the case.

On the other hand, progressives were acting as if anyone who had any level of discomfort with this was some sort of rank bigot, which is not true. It’s complicated. People are not familiar with the terrain. They don’t understand all the issues. By saying, “Hey, we’re not gonna allow total bans, but we’re gonna work on fairness,” I think Joe Biden used the power he does have to pick a good spot in the lane.

Let me contrast that with say, the abortion issue, where when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Joe Biden doesn’t have, the president doesn’t have, a whole lot of room to reassert authority there. So while he has taken action, I know that some folks say he hasn’t done enough. But it’s hard to do in that area.

Where he does have the power, I think Joe knows and he acts, and that’s a sign of understanding what you can and can’t do as president.

Reason No. 6 Joe Biden should be re-elected

He actually passed federal gun legislation. And it was bipartisan.

That’s right. Joe Biden backed and he signed the Safer Communities Act, which was the first major piece of gun regulation legislation in 30 years.

Here’s what it does. It requires people ages 18 to 21 to undergo enhanced background checks. It narrows what they call the “boyfriend loophole.” (A dating couple, one of them isn’t supposed to have guns, but they get it from the boyfriend or they give it to the boyfriend.)

It funded crisis intervention. It made investments in mental health issues, including in our schools. No matter what, this has to be part of the school safety equation is talking about mental health. I don’t see how you can be sane and do what some of those folks do. Not that you can do it without a gun, but you can’t do it and be sane at the same time.

It clarifies who needs to register as a federally licensed gun dealer, and it made a gun trafficking a distinct federal crime.

And this is bipartisan. I think everybody can agree with all those things. Good job. Like some of these other topics, these are things where the states are racing in completely different directions, and yet Joe’s able to find something that’s clearly a Democratic friendly approach, but enough for most reasonable people. If they hear what’s in it, they say, “Oh, okay, fine. Good.”

Reason No. 5 More Joe Biden is better

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Listen, there’s this thing that happens where the working folks want some stuff to help their lot. And the capitalist class, the people who the conservatives will remind us create jobs, want something completely different.

But where they can agree is on things like roads, bridges, airports, trains, public transit. The pipelines that move things around and people around. Broadband. Internet capacity. Huge bipartisan investment in infrastructure from Joe Biden and Congress.

Again, nobody gives him credit because the progressives wanted a huge package, Build Back Better. And the Republicans are not obligated to give him credit for anything. Well, I guess they kind of are in a “reasonable person” standard. But we can’t expect them to be cheerleading for it. So, there’s not a lot of cheerleaders for it.

Still, middle America is winning out here. I would submit this is huge economically, especially long term. I am ready to argue that some of the unbelievable economic growth we’ve seen over 20 years, that just seems to continue on despite all the headwinds, is at least partly due to the huge infrastructure investments made by President Obama during the Great Recession (ARRA, if you want the call back).

Reason No. 4 Joe Biden is just the best

He cut child poverty in half.

I’m not kidding, this is something we measured. The Democrats claimed they were going to do it, and they did it, thanks to an enhancement of the child tax credit.

The Census Bureau came out with this, that in 2021, 5.2% of children were in poverty, down from 9.7% the year before. That’s the supplemental poverty rate for children. And it was the lowest rate on record since it began. We are talking about 5.3 million people lifted out of poverty because of that credit.

It did expire after one year. I think the extension was in the Build Back Better plan, which was not passed. So the enhanced tax credit went away. 

But to cut child poverty in half, even for a year! I guarantee you that’s going to pay dividends for years to come, because at least for a while, those kids were out of poverty. They could achieve more in school. They were in less trouble. Their parents were less stressed out. It was a big deal.

Had it continued, that might be number one, right? I mean, if that was the only thing you did as president, was permanently cut child poverty in half in the United States, that would still be huge.

Reason No. 3 Joe Biden is good for the country

His unionism. He likes to say that he’s the most union friendly president ever. And that’s probably true.

He started his 2020 campaign at a union hall in Pittsburgh. And this week when he launched, he went to the North American Building Trade Union and gave a speech. And here’s a line: “Union workers will build roads, bridges, lay internet cable, installed 500,000 electrical vehicle chargers throughout America. And union workers are going to transform America. And union workers are going to finish the job.”

Biden is very union friendly. Julie Chavez Rodriguez is heading up his reelection campaign. She’s the granddaughter of Cesar Chavez, the union leader. And right now, even supposedly progressive companies on the left coast like Starbucks and NBC Universal are scared of their people unionizing.

It’s a historical fact that unions have to have some level of government protection in order to survive. Ee don’t need to get into the whole history, but I’m talking over the course of the United States, when you have administrations, Congress, state governments, in opposition to unions, they do not fare well.

It’s also a historical fact that when unions are at least left alone by the government, or even better for them, if there is some sort of government support (as there is in the Biden administration), their success tends to lift all boats, as the old saying goes. You will generally see the middle class in America do better when unions are doing better.

It’s not the case that when we fall on hard times, everyone says, “oh, I need a union now because they’re cutting jobs.” It’s exactly the opposite. When things are going well, when you have a support in the White House, unions expand. And more unions mean families make more money, get more healthcare, more life insurance, the whole nine yards. It’s just good for America, in my opinion. And I feel like I can back it up with facts.

Reason No. 2 Joe Biden will win

When you put Biden’s investments in infrastructure together, with his support for unions, with his support for manufacturing, what you get is a huge American middle class.

This is a big deal. We talk a lot about the polarization in America, but what about the splitting apart of the lower half of the economic spectrum from the upper half? Economic inequality is skyrocketing and Joe Biden’s been doing literally everything he can do to bring us back into the middle.

That is when I think America is at its best, when the greatest number of people are doing well. That’s when you are doing great as a country, not when you have a few people doing great and a lot of people doing poorly.

A few figures here: in two years, there’s been $300 billion invest invested in American manufacturing, and we’re talking about not trying to bring back the old DeSoto plants. We are talking about building higher tech, manufacturing facilities, factories. They obviously don’t employ as many people as they used to. Let’s get real about this. You can’t take back the Maytag plant that you moved out of Indiana or Ohio — took it to China, and now it’s coming back — it’s not gonna employ the same number of people.

But it’s way better to have it here. You’re talking about creating good paying jobs. A lot of those yes, are union jobs. A lot of them don’t require a four year degree, which means you don’t have to go through college and accumulate the debt. (And Joe Biden’s big on getting rid of student debt as well. Hooray.)

Maybe this doesn’t help the people who are on TV, the educated, pundit class, but these are all great things for the wide swath of the American middle.

Biden will tell you that nearly 11 million jobs have been created since he took office, including 750,000 manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, record number of small businesses have started. And here’s an interesting stat. 11 states at record low unemployment. People with disabilities are at record low unemployment, which is great.

Like to all of that. It is great. All of it’s wonderful.

The No. 1 reason Joe Biden should run again

He’s from Delaware.

This is what the Compass of Power is all about. The place in politics. Joe Biden is from Northern Delaware, which is a very small and specific place in America. But Joe Biden has a read on what we call “Middle America” because Middle America is both a place and a political position.

Where you’re from shapes your politics. And the politics of Northern Delaware are somewhere in the middle of American politics writ large.

Joe Biden is economically progressive. We talked about how he likes unions, he likes government investment and infrastructure in creating jobs. He talks a lot about trying to get people training, vo-tech training or go to college, limit student debt, all these sort of investments in the earning capacity of people. He’s big on healthcare — but I’m not gonna get into his healthcare policies at the moment. The point is, these are things that Americans generally support, they can get behind these left-of-center economic ideas. Joe’s a hundred percent behind that.

He is socially liberal, but not as far out as the Democratic party in general. He gets some flack from the progressives on where he is on some social issues. For example, the trans athletic issue that I talked about. I think that he moved slowly, but he looked at it carefully and came up with some kind of proposal that I think most Americans would recognize.

Joe Biden is slower to get into position than most politicians, but I think the public is slower to get into position than most politicians. That’s because politicians are following the political lobbying class, the pundit class, the activist class. But the public is like, what is going on? This wasn’t an issue last year. Why are we talking about whatever this issue is?

Joe Biden moves slow, and by doing that, he’s able to reflect back and bring along more of the American public. He largely ignores the media, which the media hates. The media now of course tends to be polarized like the rest of us. Biden does not do a lot of news conferences. He doesn’t do a lot of interviews.

Donald Trump basically watched Fox News and then used his Twitter account to stay on top of the reader board on Fox News. He was a hundred percent in the media. Joe Biden, opposite.

Again, I think that works out for the broad swath of American people. Yes, Americans may be polarized, but it’s not like everybody here is a complete political junkie. They don’t really care that much. They don’t need to hear about the president that much, whoever it is. I think that generally helps Joe, and it’s also reflective of where he’s from.

If you actually look at northern Delaware, it has a perfect semicircle at the top. It’s perfectly round because they literally took a radius from a Quaker settlement at the top and just said, this is the boundary of Delaware. They were trying to keep the Puritans and Dutch who live north of there, who constitute the New Yorkers and the Yankees – Massachusetts and New England types who spread west and are basically the liberal powerhouse of American politics. They were trying to create a barrier between those folks and Joe’s folks in Delaware, the Quakers. The Quakers were also in Pennsylvania and also moved west. They are literally in the middle between the South and the North.

And they were generally amenable to what we’d think of as socially liberal things, even back then. Particularly women’s rights. But they were not big into telling other people how to live, which is the number one favorite thing of the Yankees.

Iowa is entirely in this Middle America section. But they’ve been pretty conservative of late. And I think a lot of that, if you get down to it, is a reaction against some of the fast-moving politics of the North, the upper North, the Yankee North, and the Left Coast.

Being from Delaware, Joe Biden just naturally has an inclination to think and move within a framework that is liberal, but not super liberal, that is in the North, but not way north. And because of that, he wins. He’s able to effectively negotiate with the other side.

One way of pointing this out, why the number one thing about Joe Biden is actually where he is from, is to think about who else is out there in the running.

Kamala Harris, the vice president, is from San Francisco. I think she went to UC Berkeley. That is in no way like the rest of America. I live in that same cultural zone. That cultural zone goes from San Francisco up the west coast, actually all the way into BC Canada. But it is the “left coast,” because it is driven mostly by Yankees who arrive by ship.

If you talk about Gavin Newsom, who could potentially run for president in the future, he is the governor of California, also former mayor of San Francisco. If you follow politics at all, I think you would think that these two are definitely different from Joe Biden, and definitely not as middle of the road, not as quote-unquote “middle American” as Joe Biden.

Well, what about Pete Buttigieg? He’s from, he’s from Indiana, right? But he’s from the Yankee section, like the very top tippy, top north part.

Not even Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan is as middle America as Joe Biden. Although I would give her a close second on the list of people who might run. I think she should consider that in 2028.

On the Republican side, who do you have? Donald Trump’s from New York City. Very bombastic, loud, brash.

On the Republican side you have Ron DeSantis from Florida, who’s a major up and comer. But he, as everyone’s talking about, is facing a hard task in taking the culture war wins he’s had in Florida and translating that beyond Republican base states in the South. He has to at least pick off Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, some of these places where in theory the GOP could win.

What about Nikki Haley, former governor, governor of South Carolina? She’s a softer Republican image than Donald Trump. But can she translate the attitude of South Carolina into something that those purple states can get behind? I’m not convinced.

What about Maryanne Williamson? Where is she from? Space.

I’m kidding. She’s from everywhere. Texas, California, Michigan. I think she even moved to Iowa in 2020 to win, but she didn’t win. It’s just not gonna happen. But she has a fun character.

My point is, no one is a better approximation of the average American, if there is such a thing, than Joe Biden. There’s not going to be someone like him for a long time to come.

I think the Democrats have some issues with that, just as the Republicans do. The extremes launch candidates through the primary system. And for Democrats, that can mean being far out on politics. It can mean being far out on the coast. Honestly, you don’t run into too many Democrats that have a big winning percentage that aren’t like touching an ocean. It can mean embodying some kind of specialized identity so folks can see that we’re moving forward and we’re not just electing what we think of as the same old — I would argue that the presidents actually have many different backgrounds – but to the degree that they’re all white and male and Christian. How do we get out of that? The Democrats want to see that mold broken. But in order to do that, you have to have somebody who can still speak to the whole crowd, Barack Obama style.

I think that that’s tough for them to do on the Republican side. Now you’re in that mold, and how can you break that mold and still keep conservative people together? Can Nikki Haley win the nomination and go on to win the presidency? Can they take the Deep South ethos, which is ruled by the people who deserve to rule because they’re successful, and translate that to Iowa? I don’t know.

And to be fair, the party faithful, these super politically active folks, have passed on Biden every time he ran for president up until including 2008. But Barack Obama saw that Joe had that Middle America kind of feel, saw him as a balance to his own Illinois background, and selected him as a running mate. That’s what gave middle class Joe the national credibility that politicos probably would’ve never given him.

So, I say, go Joe! We’ll never see the likes of you again.