Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via AP
Union members and family participate in the AFL-CIO’s annual Tri-State Labor Day Parade in Philadelphia, September 4, 2023.
Since Joe Biden can’t catch a break, as the latest in a seemingly unending series of alarming polls makes clear, he’d better start making some himself.
The Wall Street Journal poll today not only shows Biden tied with Donald Trump in a hypothetical general election (not factoring in whatever damage he may receive from a No Labels or Cornel West candidacy), but shows him saddled with an anemic 39 percent approval rating. Much of this is tied to his age, but the polling on his economic policies reveals a disconnect between Biden and the public that is much more vexing.
Consider, for instance, that, by a very slim margin, more Americans disapprove of his performance in improving the nation’s infrastructure than approve it. Or that more Americans believe Trump “has a vision for the future” than Biden does.
(Trump does have such a vision, of course: It’s wreaking vengeance on his enemies, both real and imagined.)
So, what’s an octogenarian president to do? As I’ve noted before, the time it requires for many of Biden’s landmark economic initiatives to take effect in a way that benefits the broad public is a problem. Reindustrialization is a long-term project that’s of limited help in the short-term world of impending elections. The elements of Bidenomics that went down in a heap when the Build Back Better bill failed to pass—paid sick leave, affordable child care, an expanded Child Tax Credit, free community college—had very robust levels of support in the polls and would have impacted that broad public quicker and more directly than the reconstruction of the formerly industrial Midwest. Had they been enacted, they would have given at least a portion of that public an understanding of Bidenomics and what lies behind it rather than the impression that many currently hold.
For which reason, a number of pols and pundits (myself included) have argued for some time that the case Biden should take to the public must feature his commitment not just to the nation’s industrial resurrection but also to reviving and enacting those BBB provisions, and others like them. Writing on The New Republic’s website today, my buddy Michael Tomasky makes a good case that Biden should resurrect FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights for the 21st century—and for the 2024 campaign. He says that Biden also might resurrect FDR’s attacks on “economist royalists,” updated to today’s versions, singling out the pharmaceutical industry as a target-rich environment.
I’d encourage Biden to go further than that. With aides like Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey ensconced at his Council of Economic Advisers, he has at his elbow the very economists who first documented the declining share of corporate revenues and the nation’s wealth going to workers, and the exponentially rising share going to CEOs and major investors. Biden needs to run against that—the systemic denigration of labor, the diminution of the middle class at the expense of the wealthy. He should name names, banks, companies, “activist” investors, CEOs, those who have profited at American workers’ expense.
As Republicans go against corporate “wokeness,” Biden should go against corporate greed. He’d have the better of the argument, and a better way to shift much of the public’s perception of the Democrats as a party obsessed by cultural issues to a party obsessed by economic fairness, by the need to rebuild a vibrant middle class and a plausible plan to do that.
And the sooner he gets about that, the better.
