Notice too that dismissive "spar over policy." No doubt he'll say the same thing after Biden is elected and guts Social Security and Medicare, forces workers to work in a pandemic or starve, bails out Wall Street again, and vetoes the new voting rights bill. That most people aren't just sparring, which is to say playing, but concerned about their lives and their families' lives and the lives of everyone who isn't at least a multimillionaire, escapes him.
We went through this in 2008, I remember. Before Obama was elected, we skeptics were told that after he won we could hold his feet to the fire and make him enact good policies. But as soon as he was elected, before he even took office, we were told to back off, give him a chance, it was too soon to judge him, wait and see what he'd do. As I pointed out at the time, his corporate donors and friends weren't backing off: they were making sure he made the appointments they wanted, pushing him in the direction they wanted him to go. True, he would have done it anyway, because his priorities lay in corporatism and protecting the powerful from accountability. And it's doubtful how much pressure anyone to his left could have brought to bear on him. His few good appointments, such as Hilda Solis, were quietly eased out in a few months. Anyone the Right disliked had to go; Obama was very obliging.
So this is all annoyingly familiar. Biden is already surrounding himself with some of the same people Obama gravitated to, such as Larry Summers. His sycophants are telling us to wait and see, to give him a chance. I look forward to seeing the last of Trump, though former Presidents rarely disappear from public life altogether. But as Biden has said, nothing will fundamentally change under his presidency, and those who try to push him in a better direction will face not only his inertia, but the vindictive fury of his Democratic cult. It won't be pretty.
