In 1992, Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton famously answered a voter question about how the national debt affected him personally. His response was often paraphrased as “I feel your pain.”
Whether Mr. Clinton was for once being sincere or not, his words resonated.
Now, President Joe Biden is running for reelection with the opposite message: Stop complaining; everything is going great. Some of his sycophants in Congress and his stooges in the media are now complaining that the problem isn’t President Biden’s failed policies; it’s that Americans are just too stupid to understand how good things are today.
Gail Collins of The New York Times recently groused, “I know politicians aren’t supposed to lecture people about how great their lives are, but it’s weird that the nation doesn’t seem more conscious of how well things are going. ... Prices have generally stabilized or begun to drop.”
She might as well have taken out a bullhorn and screamed: “Listen up, all you little people, Bidenomics is as good as it gets. You’re just going to have to learn to live with 20 percent higher prices, trillion-dollar deficits, declining purchasing power, schools that don’t teach, crime on the streets, a porous border, and $4-per-gallon gas.”
Most people boasting about the gleaming economy are inside the Washington bubble or nested inside college faculty lounges.
This Grand Canyon divide between the ruling class and real Americans in tough, blue-collar jobs or starting a career has seldom been more pronounced. Even former President Barack Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod warned President Biden to stop hyping an economy that has left more than half of America behind. “It drives me crazy when he does that,” Mr. Axelrod said.
It also makes President Biden seem hopelessly out of touch with Main Street America. When nearly two of three Americans say things aren’t going well for their personal financial situation, the “don’t worry, be happy” bromide isn’t the response most voters are looking for.
The vast majority of Americans have seen wages and salaries lag behind inflation for more than three years. Real wages are down by almost 4 percent under President Biden. The inflation rate appeared late last year to be falling to 3 percent but now is trending back to closer to 5 percent on an annual basis. There are lots of ways of measuring the decline in real take-home pay for middle-class families, but the best measure is about a $2,500 decline in purchasing power since President Biden took over.
Even the job market is showing cracks. Part-time employment is surging, and full-time jobs have been negative over the past two months. So hourly wages are rising even as weekly pay is falling.
President Biden’s strategy is to blame former President Donald Trump for the weakling economy—a big stretch given that President Trump was already pulling the economy out of the COVID-19 recession six months before President Biden occupied the Oval Office. Inflation was 1.7 percent when President Biden’s predecessor left office; then, 18 months and $4 trillion of debt later, the consumer price index soared to 9.1 percent.
If this is “morning in America,” something tells me that voters are worried about what the afternoon is going to look like. To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s still the economy, stupid.” If President Biden wants to run for reelection on this economy, it’s all his.
