I mean, this was the covid elections; he wasn't the guy telling people to take hydroxycloroquine for covid so he won by default.
Progressive? In the sense he's a TYT (radical liberal alternative media) style lib, sure for what that's worth. Based? Not by either definition as far as I know.
And to be clearhe had a stroke,he wasn't bonked on the head. Also there is some skeletons in his closet from during his time as mayor as others have mentioned before, it was foolish to get overly excited about this guy from the beginning.
Not really. His claim to fame that got him on Colbert back in the day was "revitalizing" a dying town as mayor that made all the libs think he was a socialist. But really he was just kind of a vibes based chaotic neoliberal without any real ideology. Lot of questionable stuff in his history.
"Pretty bad on Israel" is kinda the assumption I made about 99% of US politicians and then the genocide started and I was like "Holy fuck I had no idea how bad "bad" was."