In my mind, erasing small pockets of student loan debt is one of the worst ways to invigorate your base, because the only people who are excited by that are the ones who just got their loans forgiven.

Centrists in his own party didn’t want debt forgiveness. Kept arguing that the President couldn’t forgive student debt via executive order. Biden listened to progressives and forgave student debt broadly, like you and I both want. The Supreme Court shot it down, using arguments that centrists helpfully spent months providing them. If Biden had acted like most Democrats at this point, he would have given up forever on the issue, announced he tried, and dusted off his hands in satisfaction of a job not done.

Biden didn’t do that. He moved on to forgiving what he could using the methods at his disposal. He didn’t give up. He’s done what I would have expected from an actual progressive in the same circumstances. Not gonna lie, it helps that it was blocked by the illegitimate conservative Supreme Court. Debt forgiveness has not been blocked by Biden’s own party (for once. yet.), but I suspect that’s due more to lack of opportunity than anything else.

In any event, I do not fault Biden on this. He did the right thing and continues to do the right thing.