DEMOCRATS WANT FOCUS ON INFLATION
White House being pressed to highlight efforts to ease pain
NANTUCKET, Mass.
The Biden administration has taken pains in recent days to show it is working to ease the pain of inflation for Americans.
“Moms and dads are worried, asking, ‘Will there be enough food we can afford to buy for the holidays? Will we be able to get Christmas presents to the kids on time? And if so, will they cost me an arm and a leg?’ ” President Joe Biden said in a Tuesday speech on the economy, in which he made a point of highlighting his administration’s successes boosting the economy while empathizing with Americans worried about prices.
The emphasis comes after months of pleas from worried Democrats, who have pressed White House officials to do more to acknowledge inf lation as a central concern for voters and to outline what they are doing to combat it.
That group included at least four leading Democratic pollsters who’ve urged White House chief of staff Ron Klain to make a bigger show of the policies that Biden is pursuing to stem inflation, with at least one saying they should point the finger at the villains in an economy in which large companies have seen record profits, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who regularly speaks to the administration, made the case directly to the White
House after Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s loss in the Virginia governor’s race this month, telling officials that Biden must sharpen his focus on the economy and talk to voters more directly about it, according to two other people familiar with the conversations.
Any suggestion that the White House’s focus on inf lation is new is a “false narrative, to put it bluntly” said one top White House economic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because
they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Another top White House official said that Klain has been contacted recently by just one pollster who raised inflation as an issue. Klain told the pollster that the White House was aware of it and had been taking it seriously for months, and the White House didn’t change course based on the conversation, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Klain’s thinking.
The White House pointed to a raft of actions Biden has taken — starting as early as February — to address inflation and noted high-profile appearances of top economic aides talking about the issue. It also sent a list of 26 tweets, posted to Biden’s official account from May to November, that tied various White House policies to improving economic figures.
But the issues causing alarm among those allies, who came forward after many of those tweets and actions,
are underscored by Biden’s dismal approval ratings. Just 42 percent of Americans approve of the job that Biden is doing, according to a new NPR-Marist poll, the lowest to date of their surveys. And nearly 40 percent said that inflation is their greatest economic concern, far surpassing other worries such as wages, labor shortages and unemployment.
Americans are responding to a serious problem: Inflation reached a three-decade high in October, driven by spikes in energy prices and backlogs in the supply chain.
The White House has struggled to figure out how to respond to inflation in part because the economy is growing stronger by other measures, according to a person who has spoken frequently with top White House officials about the problem and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Aside from the rising costs, many of the key indicators that economists usually use to determine the health of the economy — such as the unemployment rate and wage growth — are good, and even better than expected in some cases. For instance, on Wednesday, new data came out showing that jobless claims plummeted to the lowest levels in half a century.
There has also been a debate within the West Wing and Biden’s orbit about how long inflation will last.
There has been a flurry of activity to address the problem — some of it the result of long-planned actions and some stemming from more recent decisions.
Biden this week authorized a major release from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve made in conjunction with China and several other countries, a headlinegrabbing move designed to drive down gas prices at the pump. On Monday, he nominated Jerome Powell for another term as chair of the Federal Reserve, sidestepping liberals’ concerns and keeping President Donald Trump’s pick in charge of the central bank.