Center Did Not Hold

With Joe Biden stepping back into the national scene, the time is ripe for a close assessment of the administration in which he served as vice-president.The Center Did Not Hold weighs the progressive and not so progressive contributions of the Obama-Biden White House across more than a hundred issues involving international relations, domestic cultural and economic matters, and social justice.While Obama and Biden campaigned in the early 2000s on a host of progressive promises, Eisenberg s meticulous accounting shows that, over eight years, they failed to achieve any substantial, lasting change to that end, instead perpetuating a tradition of cautious centrism.Among the disappointments, the former president and vice-president reneged on environmental promises, pandered to lobbyists, prosecuted a record number of whistle-blowers, and failed to implement the simplest of financial reforms in response to the 2008 crisis. Under Biden s trademark counterterrorism plus strategy, they oversaw tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, and escalated violence in the Middle East.