Biden Beat Trumpflation And The Trump Crime Wave
Biden Beat Trumpflation And The Trump Crime Wave
It'd be nice if Dems would just say so!
At the outset we should stipulate that if Donald Trump were in office today—presiding over full employment at a time when Americans enjoyed more purchasing power than ever before, and inflation was hovering steadily around three percent—he and Republican officeholders across the country would claim credit for building the greatest economy in history. In fact, if Trump defeats Joe Biden in November, they’ll all sing from that hymnal by early 2025. The news media will scratch its head and finally notice, Gosh, this is a strong economy! Economic sentiment will spike as Republican voters come around to the Trump line in unison, while most Democratic voters—who are much less driven by partisanship in their responses to survey takers—will continue to acknowledge the economy is strong.
Nothing will change in the macroeconomic or policy realm, but public opinion will kip upright.
I know a bunch of liberals who disagree with each other over what Biden should do to change economic sentiment. I don’t know any who doubt my premise: Republicans would love to inherit this economy. They’d brag about how it became good the moment they took charge, and they’d quickly reap the political spoils.
Nevertheless, the emerging Democratic consensus seems to be that Biden should continue to “meet people where they are”: sympathize with the plight of the struggling, implicitly concede that the economy—which would poll through the roof with Republicans stealing credit for it—is actually bad.
“Within the White House, some aides are pushing for a message that makes empathy toward the economic plight of certain Americans more central,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday in a piece titled, Biden Needs More Empathy on the Economy, Democrats Say. “Some noticed a preview of that direction when the president described the April inflation report in a statement, writing, ‘I know many families are struggling, and that even though we’ve made progress we have a lot more to do.’”
How can this be right, though, if poor economic sentiment is a matter of pure partisan affect? If we can swap Republicans for Democrats without changing anything else, and the mass “struggling” magically goes away, it seems almost mathematically true that Democratic sheepishness over their economic successes is one of the key reasons Biden’s economy is widely viewed to be a failure. Letting people who hate Democrats or who are perennial critics of the U.S. economic system make all the strong claims about the economy, while the people in charge hide behind empathy for those left behind, is a big reason why public opinion and economic reality have detached from one another.
That’s not to say empathy has no place in Democratic campaign rhetoric. America is a big place. Even in prosperous times, millions of Americans will fall behind, and Democrats are the only major party concerned with the wellbeing of the poor. But speaking as though the Biden economy is one where more people need that kind of help, rather than less, simply affirms the false notion perpetuated by people who want to see Biden lose: That American suffering is out of control and there is much work to be done to alleviate it—as though that doesn’t reflect poorly on the man who’s been president for three and a half years.
What if instead of exaggerating the level of deprivation in America right now, Democrats characterized the situation accurately—as the most prosperous period in our lifetimes—and expressed their empathy by promising to help everyone share in the bounty? What if Biden and Democrats took pride in their accomplishments, and appealed to voters not to be taken in by prophets of false doom?
NO FEEL YOUR PAIN, NO GAIN?
A particularly insidious thing about GOP-driven economic doomerism is the way it loads the question, like “when did you stop beating your wife?”