Biden being encouraged to tout economic gains
Dems highlight progress, but voters see more to do
WASHINGTON – Seven months before he faces a critical test from voters in the midterm elections, President Joe Biden is turning his focus to kitchen-table issues as he struggles to get credit for a recovering economy.
Since Biden took office last year, job growth has been vigorous and steady – as he told the country Friday after the March jobs report showed the addition of 431,000 jobs and the unemployment rate falling to a low 3.6%. But those same remarks were also tempered by his recognition that food and gas prices are too high and that inflation is at its worst level in a generation.
For Biden, convincing Americans of the progress made in the economic recovery serves as a salient reminder of how much further the country has to go.
“Our economy has gone from being on the mend to being on the move,” Biden said, even as he acknowledged Americans are not ready for a victory lap. “I know that this job is not finished: We need to do more to get prices under control.”
At times, Biden’s bifurcated messaging – like the state of the economy itself – can seem like a jumble of contradictions. It leaves voters to piece together their own opinions, potentially to the president’s political peril.
Record wage gains of 5.6% over the past year, for example, run up against consumer prices that have risen at 7.9% annually. Biden’s announcement last week of plans to release a million barrels
of oil daily from the U.S. strategic reserve over the next six months was a recognition of the harm that inflation can have not just on the economy but on his own policy ambitions.
The economic discontent is reflected in public opinion polls.
Roughly 7 in 10 people in the United States describe the economy as being in poor shape, while nearly two-thirds disapprove of Biden’s economic leadership, according to a March poll by the Associated PRESS-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Administration officials and Biden allies happily point to the job creation data as a sign of accomplishment, but they are also perturbed by the lingering economic malaise that threatens him with a historically inhospitable environment for a president’s party in a midterm year.
They have advised Biden to spotlight his work to bring down gas prices and
forthcoming efforts to try to curtail an increase in food prices.
Biden’s latest message to voters is that he can bring the nation’s finances under control too.
His annual budget request highlighted a $1 trillion decrease in the deficit over 10 years.
Biden’s aides also hope he can spend more time focusing on other ways that government is working to make concrete changes in people’s lives, with infrastructure investments and the improving economy.
“I’m well aware that midterms are obviously always difficult for the party in power, but we’ve got a great story to tell,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told NBC’S “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “There is a lot of good accomplishments to be putting up on the board, and the Democrats in office and out need to be doing a better job of making the case.”