Being president either matters or it does not.
Wrong. It's not an either/or, it's a scale. 'How much does the president matter?' is a legitimate question and it changes when we zoom in on each issue. The president leads just one of the three branches of the federal government. You also have state and local governments all throughout the country that are collectively just as important, as well as governments all throughout the world making their own decisions. You also have private entities everywhere (like big corporations) making major decisions that affect all of us which the federal government has no legal right to intervene in.
So the president certainly matters, but to suggest he's the only thing that matters is to pretend none of these other governments/entities exist or have any power/rights of their own. That's absurd, and yet it is the notion that all of these "look at the country then and now" arguments are based on.
Again, we judge president's not merely on what happens while they were in office but on what influence they had.
While your reflexive and cartoonish "context" defense seems on the surface to work in Biden's defense, in the end, it simply weakens him.
Context is always going to be a crucially important aspect of understanding any affair, so putting it in quotes and acting like I'm using it as an excuse just makes you look stupid.
A good example of this was Hur proclaiming Biden as too forgetful to be held responsible.
It's a good example of how effectively propaganda works. The transcripts have since been released and shown Hur's comments inn this to be factually wrong. He was lying, Biden remembered everything, but that won't stop the MAGA base from repeating this till November and beyond.
The big difference of course is that Trump had 3 good years in balance with the 1 bad year. Biden has a grand total of zero good years according to the polls.
That's because Biden was handed the mess Trump left him. Regardless of what blame you put on either of them, the circumstances Biden inherited are objectively worse than that of Trump. Biden was handed an economy still mostly shut down and a supply chain that was destroyed. Trump was handed an economy that had been growing for 7 straight years with no major national or global issues. To pretend isn't factual or doesn't matter is flagrantly disingenuous.
But even setting that aside, it's hilarious that you base your assessment on polls, as if we don't have objective ways to measure these things.
It also reminds me of why the polls are so skewed; because right wingers generally don't care about facts. One of the best illustrations of this was a poll done after the 2016 election. The polls asking people if they thought the economy was doing well showed about approval for democrats in about the high 70's in the final months of Obama's presidency. Then within months of Trump's election victory, that number dropped into the 50's.
Any rational observer can see that for what it is. There was no major change to the state of the economy that happened at that time, only thing that changed was who was in office, so it's clearly a partisan motivated drop.
So what was the change for republicans? It went from approvals in the teens at the end of the Obama presidency, and within months of Trump's victory was in the high 90's.
That's absurd and this example is yet another data point of what we already know; facts matter fat less to republicans. This is just another example of why we don't base any attempt at a factual assessment of something like the economy on polls.
