Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Biden delivers remarks on the economy, June 28, 2023, at the Old Post Office in Chicago.
The White House has begun to roll out messaging around something that will plainly be a central part of President Biden’s re-election campaign: the economy. With the best job creation record at this point in his presidency since either Franklin Roosevelt (by raw numbers) or Ronald Reagan in his first term (by percentage growth), unemployment steadily below 4 percent, inflation falling, and real wage growth turning positive, there is a lot to boast about. “His plan—Bidenomics—is rooted in the recognition that the best way to grow the economy is from the middle out and the bottom up,” says a White House press release.
In some ways, though, it’s a difficult case to make. Biden’s ambitious attempt to transform the American welfare state was mostly a flop. But his biggest obstacle probably has more to do with perception than anything else, suggesting that a sustained messaging effort might bear real fruit. It remains to be seen, however, whether Biden or his party can manage that.
It’s almost hard to remember now, but Biden’s Build Back Better bill had all kinds of goodies in it—paid family and sick leave, a $15 minimum wage, permanent extension of his Child Tax Credit, two years of free community college, dental and vision benefits for Medicare, and child care subsidies. None of that passed. Instead, the only welfare stuff that got through was a boost to the Obamacare exchanges and some mild drug price reforms in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Meanwhile, the whole pop-up safety net built during the pandemic—where, briefly, American unemployment benefits were considerably more generous than those in the Nordics, and states were prevented from kicking people off Medicaid—has been torn up piece by piece, largely thanks to neoliberal ideology and corruption among Senate swing votes. Joe Manchin personally killed the Child Tax Credit because he thought poor people would spend the money on drugs. And now, thanks to the debt ceiling deal, student loan payments will be coming back in October (which is almost certain to be a logistical disaster).
The main feature of Biden’s legislative record is instead a whole bunch of industrial policy. With the infrastructure bill, CHIPS, and the Inflation Reduction Act, the idea is to bring high-tech manufacturing back to America itself, as well as allied countries. This will take some time to bear fruit, but early signs are promising. Investment in manufacturing construction in particular has exploded from an annual rate of $74 billion when Biden was inaugurated to $190 billion in April (the most recent data point).
Given those trends, and the broadly positive macroeconomic indicators, it is rather mysterious why Biden gets such atrocious marks on the economy. According to a recent AP-NORC poll, only 34 percent of adults approve of his economic record, and just 30 percent rate the economy as good. Even among Democrats, only 47 percent say it’s good.
One can criticize Biden (or, more plausibly, Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) for failing to land so many welfare promises, and people don’t like inflation, but this judgment is far too harsh. The economy of today is at the least roughly comparable to late 2019 and early 2020, when Gallup’s economic confidence index was in the 25–40 range. As of May this year, it stood at minus 43, which is not far off the nadir of the Great Recession in early 2009.
Given the trends, and the broadly positive macroeconomic indicators, it is rather mysterious why Biden gets such atrocious marks on the economy.
My hypothesis is that this divergence is largely due to propaganda and vibes. Consider foreign policy, where Biden has turned in the strongest performance of any president in decades, and at an exceptionally challenging time. He’s ended the war in Afghanistan, drastically scaled back the drone war, quietly stopped a military coup in Brazil, and patched up the holes Donald Trump tore in the alliance with Europe just in time to coordinate a thus far highly successful effort to assist Ukrainian defense against Russian invasion. (Again, there is much to criticize here, but compared to Trump, Obama, Bush II, or Clinton, Biden easily comes out on top.)
Yet the withdrawal from Afghanistan triggered a hysterical mainstream media meltdown, where Objective Journalists on cable news furiously scolded Biden for weeks. It seemed that facing the truth that the entire Afghan occupation had been horrifically bungled from start to finish somehow wounded their imperial pride, and so they lashed out. But in response, Biden had little but a couple of speeches insisting he had done the right thing, and then he largely clammed up. Sure enough, in the Gallup tracking poll, Biden’s foreign-policy approval rating went from 56 percent, to 46 percent once the withdrawal began, and has since hovered around 40 percent.
Most ordinary voters appear to be doing reasonably well in their own personal finances. Witness the consumer confidence index, which recently hit the highest level since January 2022, before the major inflation surge. But then they turn on the news each night and hear dire stories about inflation, supply chain difficulties, housing prices, interest rates, and so on, with little or no consistent pushback from Democrats. And whenever Biden himself speaks on the problem, he sounds like an old man who is constantly tripping over his words, because he is.
Say what you like about Trump, he had an instinctive sense for propaganda. The main thing to do is find a simple message that resonates with people, and repeat it ten billion times. Then he had a loyal messaging operation—namely, the conservative media complex, with a substantial assistance from mainstream media like CNN—broadcasting that message across the country every minute of every day.
Democrats don’t have anything remotely like the right-wing media apparatus. Their typical approach is to try to get positive mainstream media coverage, and then complain when they don’t get it. Now, I’m no Rupert Murdoch. But my advice would be for Democrats and the White House to set up a messaging system that delivers a positive view not just of Biden and the economy of today, but the values of the Democratic Party as a whole—and does so consistently, not just during campaign season. Otherwise Biden’s very real accomplishments will be drowned out by the foghorn blast of conservative shouting.
