Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images
The Biden presidency was in many ways predicated on not taking credit for achievements.
Democratic anxiety has ratcheted up to the point of neurosis. The presidential election today is within the margin of error, with a difference of a point or two. By way of comparison, at this moment in 2000 George W. Bush was up by seven points, and by August of that year, by 16 points. At no point was Al Gore publicly admonished to step aside, nor was any conspiracy to somehow throw him out at the convention openly discussed. Gore came out, kissed his wife, gave a speech about the people vs. the powerful, and the race was tied in a blink.
Such patience is not in evidence today. The default mode for Democrats is panic, and for Republicans, bravado. It pervades the way politics feels, regardless of results, and tilts the turf on which the election is waged in a conservative direction. It hobbles clear thinking about the dynamics of elections, and in some ways perpetuates the outcome; after all, people love a bandwagon.
What Democrats need to know right now is why they’re losing in the presidential race, so they can be confident in adopting the right strategies to change course. Some pundits are attempting to reason out theories, sometimes seven theories at a time. I have a few of my own, which separately point to the fact that policy matters, though you can’t expect people to intuit that policy themselves.
The first thing to say here is just that inflation is bad, and this first sustained round in 40 years has been poison for heads of state, regardless of their political ideology. Biden’s situation is positively sunny compared to Justin Trudeau or Rishi Sunak; indeed, just about every incumbent in a highly industrialized nation who presided over inflation is in rather terrible shape, from Japan to France to South Korea to Germany.
That should put the cottage industry of “what Biden is doing wrong” takes in their proper context; he’s in better shape than his colleagues, in part because his economy is faring better than other nations. But price hikes have a strong downward pull, and contra Ezra Klein, they are borne by heads of state, not governors or senators.
It’s true that inflation in the U.S. has been generally stable for a year, at a level barely above the norm, and wages have increased more rapidly in the aggregate, bringing Americans more purchasing power. But I think economist J.W. Mason is right to say that the time period by which we chart inflation statistics, over one or 12 months, is not necessarily the most obviously correct one. “The change in prices over the past several years is just as much an economic fact as the change over the past year,” Mason posted on Twitter. (That change in prices appears to be worse in areas less favorable to Democrats.) People have not reconfigured their mental beliefs of what things should cost, and assuming their view of this is simply wrong is the equivalent of the satirical Bertolt Brecht decree that the government should “dissolve the people and elect another.”
During the 2020 election, candidate Biden made a promise to not be a totalizing force in people’s lives as president.
I think there’s another driver here. Cory Doctorow has blessed us with the term “enshittification,” though for purposes of historical accuracy I must note that the blogger Yves Smith came up with the concept more than a decade ago, under the sobriquet “crapification.” For at least this long, consumers have been abused, as their role as the primary group companies must please has been supplanted by Wall Street. As surplus value pools in the hands of investors and executives, product quality suffers and customer service drifts into the territory of nightmares. Yet market power locks people into enduring these burdens. This has been happening for a while, but inflation punctuated it and made it more visible. When you’re paying more for the same stuff, you might ruminate on how the stuff was better back when you were paying less.
Biden is therefore being punished for a buildup of degradations that corporate America has inflicted upon its customers for decades. The demoralizing nature of crapification combines with the demoralizing nature of price rises, and people cast about for someone to blame.
That they have put it on the president is natural, even though the policy side of this administration, more than any other in recent memory, is actually working to punish companies for these practices. Nobody in decades has attempted to take on private equity bust-outs, junk fees, and the lock-in effects of corporate concentration like the high-profile officials in the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Antitrust Division of the Justice Department.
Yet Biden gets almost no credit for these or other achievements, and this is what really frustrates partisans, who cannot believe the polling they’re seeing, where Americans think the economy is in recession and unemployment is at a 50-year high rather than a 50-year low. (In this case, we should probably choose not to believe the polling that found this result, given that it was conducted by the perfectly self-interested Mark Penn.)
What I think is not understood enough is that the Biden presidency was in many ways predicated on not taking credit for achievements.
DURING THE 2020 ELECTION, CANDIDATE BIDEN made a promise to not be a totalizing force in people’s lives as president. He would not generate drama or instigate day-to-day hysteria; he would end rage-tweeting and fight-picking and endless boasting. He would be a different kind of president, concerned with quiet progress over self-aggrandizement. He would bring things back to normal.
There was a comfort in this, and because we’re dealing with Democrats, anxiety about that comfort, fueling worries that a mass of resistance leaders “going back to brunch” would dissipate the energy around changes that needed to be made. By and large, the administration has gotten done what it wanted to do anyway, without a rank-and-file army pushing from below. But this determination to disconnect the presidency from Americans, after four years of a presidency delivered directly to the national bloodstream, has not worked out well in building a record.
Over the Trump years, Americans became accustomed to substituting noise for action. If Donald Trump was yelling about something or other, at least it meant there was a debate going in Washington. There was a sense of motion about the Trump presidency that was at odds with the generally torpid output.
In the Biden administration, this dynamic is flipped. His legislative record was decent for the first two years, and his administrative record decent throughout; but because politics has now become more of a rap battle than the gradual establishment of foundations for progress, nobody gets the sense that anything is happening.
Some of this is the failings of the storyteller and his age. Biden’s not a great messenger. But the bigger problem is he hasn’t wanted to carry any message. Matt Stoller’s readout of how Biden’s press secretaries, whose job is to explain the White House agenda, consistently demur at saying anything about what that agenda is, is indicative of a political decision to stay out of people’s feeds and recede into the background. There are theories about how speaking softly lowers the temperature for legislative dealmaking, but it’s the worst way to maintain standing among voters, especially coming off a presidential term where talk stood in for action.
The fact that Biden took on advisers from the Sanders and Warren wing of the party, far from being a concession to left-wing ascendancy, was a concession to the reality that Biden had practically no policy apparatus as a candidate. He had a choice to reimpose the Clinton/Obama retreads that put the country on the path to electing Donald Trump, or the only other idea factory in the party. This worked out for the business of policy, but the pillars of this strategy—industrial policy, trustbusting, strengthening labor, and generally providing the counterweights to crapification—were so novel that they required a politics that educates the public on their rationale. That stands in direct contrast to the hands-off approach signaled by Biden before his inauguration.
Former White House adviser Tim Wu’s frank discussion of both the history and current practice of presidents in antitrust policy lends some support to this view. On the policy side, Biden’s team is attempting to reconnect antitrust with politics; on the political side, there remains “a significant distance from involvement in or even mentioning individual cases.” (This is starting to change, as Karine Jean-Pierre did decide to comment on the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Ticketmaster.)
Part of this is overcautiousness from White House lawyers concerned with being seen as influencing legal actions. But part of it is a conscious choice. It’s a bad choice, because the public was taught through nonstop coverage of Trump and a Great Man depiction of history going back centuries that the president is the center of the political story. If you decide to move out of that spotlight, you must not be doing anything worth a damn.
Though I haven’t mentioned Gaza up to now, I should say that this disinterest in vocalizing policy is playing a huge role here. The feebleness of having Benjamin Netanyahu viciously ignore every back-channel entreaty to restraint is palpable, and it sums up people’s attitude about the president.
The election shines a spotlight even on the reluctant, and maybe this will bounce in Democrats’ direction. Consumer resistance to price levels is spurring some discounting, border crossings are falling precipitously, crime rates have come down, clean-energy investment is soaring, and entire industries are being reshored. Those realities will be aired in public, though whether the voters who matter most will see or feel them is still an open question.
But at least some of the discontent and belief in government futility is locked in, not just because inflation is poisonous to political fortunes but because Biden wanted to keep his achievements locked away. That obviously has to change.
Running a populist campaign has been the Democratic antidote to voter apathy or anger for the entirety of their run in winning the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. Bill Clinton said that Americans who worked hard and played by the rules should get a fair shot. Gore pitted the people vs. the powerful. Barack Obama, who had populism surgically removed from his person at birth, reacted to an economy in a far worse state than today by running ruthlessly in his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, who was depicted as the private equity ghoul who literally just fired you.
Donald Trump, who is seeking bribes from oil companies and wants to give corporations more tax breaks as a reward for their elevated profits, is if anything easier to target in this manner. Biden flirted with it in 2020 and even this year, using a “Scranton vs. Park Avenue” formulation. It may be boring to see this old-time religion from Democrats every four years, and in the past maybe tiresome in its hypocrisy. But for Biden, or at least for the significant faction of his administration trying to change the rules of the economy, it would have the added benefit of being correct.
