Alex Brandon/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks about gas prices and oil company profits, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, October 31, 2022.
In his 1975 memoir of his long career at The New Yorker, Brendan Gill tells the story of the writing on the wall. It seems that back in the day (roughly, the 1930s), a person walking down one of the office’s long corridors would find the word “Too” written on the wall, by Gill’s fellow New Yorker James Thurber. Only, it didn’t just say “Too.” It said “Tooooooo ….” with the o’s continuing all the way until the corridor ended at its intersection with another corridor. And when you turned the corner into that second hallway, there on that wall was the word “Late.”
I relate this story because I fear it may encapsulate one reason why the Democrats probably won’t do all that well next Tuesday. To be sure, there are a host of reasons baked into that failure, if indeed failure is what we’ll see. There’s the foundational fact that the party in power almost invariably fares poorly in midterms, that inflation is blamed on the party in power not just here but across the globe, and that right-wing media and pols aren’t constrained, to put it mildly, by adherence to facts.
But should Tuesday be the bad news day (apologies to Ira Gershwin) that’s widely anticipated, one additional factor will be the tardiness of the Democrats to come up with something to say that addresses the public’s number one concern: the soaring cost of living. As Stan Greenberg and others have been writing here and elsewhere for quite some time, and as Bernie Sanders has also advocated, Democrats needed to acknowledge this reality, put forth their remedies, and contrast them with the Republicans’ positions for at least the past several months. Instead, it’s only in the past few weeks that Democrats have made that pivot.
On Monday—just eight days before the election, and well after millions of Americans had already cast their ballots—President Biden called for a windfall profits tax on oil companies if their prices didn’t drop, if they didn’t offer rebates to consumers, if they didn’t at least seek to expand production. To be sure, this came one day after ExxonMobil posted the highest quarterly profit in its 152-year history, and Chevron the second-highest quarterly profit since its own founding. But oil company profits had been soaring for the past year, prompting a host of other nations (including the U.K., governed by those crazy left-wing Tories) to adopt windfall profits taxes of their own. As Democratic strategist Faiz Shakir has been suggesting, this would be a potent cause for Democrats to adopt—vowing, say, to enact such a tax in the lame-duck session and highlighting the opposition or silence with which Republicans would respond to such a proposal.
Now, in the closing weeks of the campaign, Democrats are finally recasting their messaging to the price of gas, the price of drugs, the Republicans’ threats to Social Security and Medicare and the like. Perhaps this will work. My fear, however, is that it may well be
TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
LATE.
