Opportunism != leadership.

Leadership: fighting for what you believe in and trying to convince the public of your viewpoint.
Path of least resistance: governing according to the polls.

Leadership is also updating your ideas as you realize they are wrong.

This is gonna be a fun 4 years as suddenly you guys become interested in consistency and competent governance

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Dec 6 2020 12:12pm

Yes, and that's an area in which Trump has completely failed; and it has consequently cost him his reelection. He deserved it.

Nonetheless, leadership entails not being a pushover. "Realizing that you were wrong" takes more than some negative polls or headwind in NYTimes/WaPo/Atlantic op-eds.

Biden's positions are more popular than Trump's. Plain and simple. You can spin that into a bad thing... but try to hold off on the Biden Derangement Syndrome until he's in office bruh.

To be determined. Time will tell.

Biden barely has any positions. His popularity has more to do with him not being Trump than anything else. This election was a referendum on Trump not Biden's position, that's why Biden sat in his basement pretty much the whole time and still managed to win on a vague platform.

back to new warmongering in brown countries, screwing over the American taxpayer/working class/middle class, and appeasement of iran and china’s expansionist policies. this appeals to quite a large segment of our population sadly

People said the same thing about Hillary. It wasn't true then... it's not true now.

I think it's true and untrue, depending on the perspective. Throughout his entire career, Biden has always been an oppurtunist who tried to position himself in the ideological middle of wherever his party was at any given moment in time. Back in the 90s, when his party had steered quite far to the right to win elections again, he pushed an unnecessarily punitive crime bill which lead to the incarceration of tens of thousands of predominantly black and brown men. Nowadays, his party has gone fully "woke" and Biden consequently muses about amnesty and stuff like that.

So in this sense, I would say that Biden himself does not have strongly held beliefs or positions - he simply adopts the mainstream of the Democratic party. And in this sense, he of course does stand for specific policy positions.

I think you have to look at the context of the times to judge what politicians did decades ago.

But otherwise I think you're about right.