By
Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday,
September 26, 2022
In Politico this
morning, Adam Cancryn tells a sad tale of the economic and political
injustices that are being suffered by our 46th president. “The White House,”
Cancryn reports,
finally believes it has an economic story worth telling. Now, it’s
trying to figure out how to get voters to listen.
Emboldened by a string of legislative victories, President Joe Biden has
leaned into his record on the economy, increasingly confident that the nation’s
outlook is brightening after months under a cloud of rising prices and consumer
anxiety.
And the
problem is?
But just as the White House was rushing to capitalize on its winning
streak — in hopes of turning around an economic narrative that has dogged the
administration from its earliest days — complications have arisen.
Oh, no!
What are these pesky “complications,” which, unforeseen by
all, have passively “arisen” before the executive branch’s weary eyes?
The lengthy fall in gas prices finally ended, inflation has stayed
stubbornly high and a bleak global economic landscape has rattled the markets,
with both the Dow Jones and S&P 500 nearing their weakest levels of the
year.
So, the
“complications” that have “arisen” are . . . all the things that have been a
problem for a long time now, and that President Biden, who would rather do
other things, has decided either to ignore or to make worse?
And no,
passing a bill called “The Inflation Reduction Act” does not count as
mitigation. Here’s CBS News, earlier this
month, with an absolutely
hilarious description of that legislation:
The Inflation Reduction Act is aimed at tackling a host of problems,
from climate change to catching tax cheats, but there’s one issue it may not
solve: reducing inflation.
Back
to Politico:
The cross currents of economic and political news have left the White
House in a tricky position. After spending much of his term battling inflation
and fears of a recession, Biden has begun traveling the country touting
long-term investments in manufacturing and climate.
The
problem with this is that it isn’t true. Biden has spend much of his term coexisting with
“inflation and fears of a recession.” But he has spent pretty much none of his
term “battling” it. On the contrary: almost everything that he and his party have
done — including his most recent move, the illegal “forgiveness” (i.e.
transference) of up to one trillion dollars in student debt — has made
inflation worse, made interest-rate hikes more likely, and made the “fear of a
recession” more acute.
James
Carville has thoughts:
“You can’t pivot away from the obvious,” said James Carville, the
longtime Democratic strategist, of the inflationary challenges that have hung
over Biden’s presidency. “You have to talk about how you’re trying to help
people deal with the rise in the cost of living.”
What
Carville means, of course, is that you can’t “pivot away from the obvious”
and remain popular. But you absolutely can “pivot away from the
obvious” — as Joe Biden has now been demonstrating for more than a
year-and-a-half. The problem here is not that “inflation and fears of a
recession” have suddenly jumped out of the ground, shocking everyone and
upending Biden’s agenda. The problem here is that Joe Biden is bored by
reality. As I wrote last
week, a sensible
president:
would have started planning for all this on January 20, 2021 — or even
before then. Noting that the federal government had just spent an astonishing
$4.1 trillion fighting Covid-19, the new president could have adopted a
defensive posture from the start. “All presidents have agendas,” he might have
told the public. “But mine has been reshaped by events. My task is to bring us
out of the pandemic, to help fix the supply chains, to keep on top of the
impending inflation crisis, and to restore our balance sheets to health. That
is my calling, and I shall meet it with dispatch.”
But Joe
Biden isn’t a sensible president, and didn’t do any of that. Of course he’s
is finding it hard to take a victory lap. There’s no victory to celebrate.
One of
the biggest challenges that Biden and his party now face is their near-total
inability to distinguish between their narrow ideological agenda and the health
of the country at large. I’m not just talking here about the Democratic Party’s
grotesque tendency to equate its electoral victories with the health of
“democracy” per se. I’m talking about this:
“Legislatively, the last 90 days have been nothing short of amazing —
that’s just a fact,” said Robert Wolf, an Obama-era economic adviser who
maintains ties to the Biden White House. “We have to be really feeling good
about what’s taken place.”
Amazing
for whom? As did the American Rescue Plan, the “Inflation Reduction
Act” does, indeed, contain a lot of provisions that progressives like. But the
country? Well, again:
The lengthy fall in gas prices finally ended, inflation has stayed
stubbornly high and a bleak global economic landscape has rattled the markets,
with both the Dow Jones and S&P 500 nearing their weakest levels of the
year.
And:
the cost of staples like food and housing remain elevated. The grinding
war in Ukraine means gas prices could spike again too. And the Federal
Reserve’s aggressive attempts to ease inflation are prompting fresh worry that
its tactics will steer the economy right into a recession.
But
other than that, Mr. Biden, how was the rally?
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