In his June 28 speech at the Old Post Office in Chicago, President Joe Biden repeated many of the talking points he had previously used when discussing the economy.
Biden emphasized his vision of an “economy that grows from the middle out and bottom up, rather than just top down. When that happens, everyone is fine.”
He compared it to what came before: “This vision is a fundamental break with the economic theory that has failed America’s middle class for decades. It’s called trickle-down economics…it’s the belief that we should lower taxes on the rich and big corporations.”
The President took his critique of neoliberalism a little further: “And we believe that we should reduce public investment in infrastructure and public education – reduce it; that we should allow good jobs to go abroad,” he said. “And we actually have a tax policy that encourages them to go abroad to save money. We should give big corporations more power while making it harder to join a union.”
He pointed to the social and moral consequences that millions of Americans have suffered as a result of neoliberalism: “The trickle-down approach has failed the middle class. He failed America. He drove up the deficit. He increased inequality. And it weakened our infrastructure. He has destroyed the dignity, pride, and hope of one community after another, particularly through the Midwest, western Pennsylvania, and farther west.”
All of that, in a way, we’ve heard from Biden for many years and throughout his tenure as President.
Then, however, he did something he had never done before: he owned the current economy.
“When I ran, I knew we couldn’t go back to the same failed policies, so I came into office determined to change the economic direction of this country, to move from trickle-down economics to what everyone on Wall Street Read Journal and Financial.” The Times started calling it “bidenomics,” he told the audience. “I didn’t make up the name. Really not. I claim it now, but they were the ones who used it first.”
I’ve written before that it’s ridiculous to give presidents so much credit or blame for the state of the economy. Inflation, particularly in volatile and vital commodities like gasoline, fluctuates due to events well beyond the control of the person in the Oval Office. Bad weather can damage the airline industry and destroy the agricultural sector. The Federal Reserve, not the President, controls monetary policy. Every time Biden claims credit for good economic news, I cringe because I know he’ll be blamed for the bad news as well.
It will be a long time before Americans can separate their assessment of their President from their assessment of the economy. In the meantime, Biden’s decision to rely on the idea that he is in control and that “bidenomics” caused the current unclear economic picture might make sense. Why? Because he is blamed for the economic problems anyway.
If you watch Fox News, you don’t know that we have a record-breaking unemployment rate in this country, but I can’t remember a night when every show didn’t have a segment focused on inflation. And these segments are meaningful because they not only discuss macroeconomic statistics, but also interview people whose livelihoods are being impacted by higher prices or whose retirement savings have been depleted.
Biden is at his best when he talks about the moral dimension of the economy. In his February State of the Union address, he made some of the same points he made in Chicago, saying at one point, “My economic plan is to invest in places and people that have been forgotten. Amid the economic upheavals of the past.” Four decades too many people have been left behind or treated as if they were invisible. Maybe it’s you watching at home.” The President is at his best when he engages with the American working class with a clear economic message and policies that address the issues facing the American working class.
Furthermore, in his Chicago address, as in his State of the Union address and when the spending bill finally passed the Senate last summer, Biden emphasized that regardless of the ups and downs of the economy, Biden is trying to restore a Rooseveltian approach to assessing the economy Business. GDP, inflation and markets will falter, but the morale of the economy will be changed by public policies. The wages of low-income workers increased by 6% between 2020 and 2022. Biden can be forgiven for not mentioning that the wealth of most Americans has declined under his supervision, but one group, the poorest 20% of Americans, has seen their wealth increase. The economy as a whole may falter, but it’s becoming fairer and fairer.
Politically, too, Biden’s decision to own the economy makes sense, because if he and his party don’t celebrate the good things about the economy, the average voter will only hear the bad from the Republican Party. This is a lesson Biden learned from the political fallout from the Affordable Care Act. Democratic congressional candidates, aware that the law was controversial and unpopular, did not defend it in the 2010 midterm elections. So the only people talking about the ACA were the Republicans. They won an historic landslide victory, in part because no one defended the popular parts of the law and most of those parts had not yet come into force.
There’s another reason why claiming the nickname “bidenomics” might work: It’s good rhetoric. The biography of the great pioneer of social justice, Monsignor John A. Ryan is called the Right Reverend New Dealer. That, too, was just a swear word at first, but Ryan took it. FDR’s “Fala” speech about his Scottie dog was a political stroke of genius that parried Republican attacks with humor and condescension. Ronald Reagan allayed concerns about his age with a brilliant response in the second debate with Walter Mondale. If Biden can put economic worries back on Republicans, what’s left for them to do?
There are days when I worry about the President’s ability to campaign effectively. He’s aged. He sometimes gets caught up in culture war issues. The world stage is full of chaos. But last week in Chicago we saw a President who has a vision for the country to be re-elected in 2024. We need to see more of this.
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