AS POLLS SOUR, ‘BIDENOMICS’ BITES THE DUST
Gerald Ford banned the use of the term “detente” in his 1976 campaign due to the policy’s increasingly negative connotations in the minds of voters.
Forty-eight years later, Joe Biden, a first-term senator when Jimmy Carter beat Ford and now an improbable president seeking a second term, has apparently ordered that the term “Bidenomics” be laid to rest due to the increasingly negative connotations it provokes in the minds of voters.
Biden’s die-hard supporters, always eager to spin any bad news that could be conceivably traced back to Biden in a fashion that might help Donald Trump, claim that people are doing just fine under Biden, but the people themselves apparently see it differently: According to the most recent Gallup poll, Biden has by a considerable margin the lowest approval ratings for a president at this juncture in a presidency since they’ve been tracking such things, with handling of the economy the greatest complaint.
The idea of putting Biden’s personal stamp on a bad economy, and then continuing to try to convince the public that it wasn’t bad, was a gift to his opponents.
When people are having a difficult time buying houses and cars and making the payments on those they might already have (or even the insurance), you try various tactics, including blaming others for the hard times, deflecting attention onto more favorable issues, or perhaps, admitting to some mistakes, and promising to work harder.
What you don’t do is give it all your name and brag about how great it is. And then dismiss the sticker shock in the grocery checkout line and at the gas pump as figments of ignorant people’s imaginations.
There is thus something both amusing and pathetic when Democrat mouthpieces like Paul Krugman tell people who claim to be hurting that they aren’t.
The last incumbent Democrat seeking re-election, Barack Obama, also presided over a weak economy, but successfully persuaded voters that it was more George W. Bush’s fault than his. Biden will get no such pass. When it comes to the political consequences of economic conditions, most people don’t feel high unemployment because the vast majority remain employed. They don’t necessarily cheer on job creation because they already have one. And they don’t pay that much attention to the stock market because they don’t have much invested in it.
Even foreign-policy debacles like Afghanistan have limited impact on electoral outcomes because our limited attention span about foreign matters tends to consign them to the periphery of the public’s radar.
Which leaves inflation and its demoralizing impact on the daily lives of Americans. It can’t be ignored or spun, or even shored up by friendly media coverage. People feel and suffer from it on an hourly basis, when doing just about anything that involves money, goods and services.
When it comes to inflation, it seems that at every juncture where a decision could have been made that would have had the effect of reducing or increasing it, Biden chose the latter, despite what just about everyone except Democrat sycophants was predicting would happen, which was an eruption of inflation.
It was as if the Biden team were trying to repeal the sturdy laws of economics, or, worse still, had never learned them in the first place.
Up to only a few weeks ago I thought Biden would win re-election despite his deep unpopularity. The Democrats have a vastly superior turnout-the-vote machine, lots more campaign funding and an unprecedented level of media support.
And then there’s also the possibility that his opponent might be a convicted felon by November. But the hunch is that none of that, even taken together, is going to beat inflation.
And when Trump returns to the White House, Biden and “Bidenomics” will and should be blamed.