Joe Biden’s Persistent Unpopularity Is No Mystery

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

 

The latest craze on the Left is a bit of performance art in which its members posture theatrically befuddled over the causes of Joe Biden’s unpopularity.

 

The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. is confounded. Sure, there’s inflation, he writes, but price instability has declined, and America’s straits in that regard are no more dire than Western Europe’s. The pandemic is behind us, unemployment is historically low, and Biden “makes a great effort to reach out to Republicans,” so their hostility toward the president is clearly suspect.

 

Newsweek’s Matt Robinson is also confused. Biden has presided over “the greatest single year of job creation in American history,” he wrote with apparent (and undue) sincerity. The president has seen an increase in manufacturing jobs, marshaled society toward almost universal Covid vaccination, and spent wild sums pursuing infrastructure projects and anti-poverty programs. What gives? Robinson locates the source of the president’s problem in the malaise that has settled over progressives who were promised “big federal moves” and only got hypercompetent governance — the ingrates.

 

New York magazine’s Eric Levitz is similarly perplexed. The “misery index,” which combines the unemployment and inflation rates into one terrible metric, is “lower now than it’s been during 83 percent of all months since 1978,” he wrote. True enough, but 20 of those months in which the “misery index” surged to double digits occurred during Biden’s term in office.

 

Although inflation has eased some, it hasn’t where it counts. Per the Wall Street Journal, prices “are stubbornly rising for what retail and food executives refer to as ‘the center store,'” a euphemism for non-perishable staples from cereals to paper towels. In percentage terms, the cost of these goods is up by double digits across a variety of categories from just months or even weeks ago. And to judge by this report, many of the customers surveyed by Journal reporters went out of their way to note the tradeoffs they have had to make to stretch their dollars as far as possible.

 

That’s an inconvenience that almost everyone feels and is liable to resent.