The following editorial originally appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
‘It’s the economy, stupid.” So declared Bill Clinton’s insurgent 1992 campaign, summing up the issue that would, more than any other, fuel his victory over President George H.W. Bush.
If the economy brings down President Joe Biden in similar fashion this year — recent polling ominously hints at history repeating itself — it will be especially ironic, given that virtually every indicator right now points to a strong, even remarkable post-pandemic economic recovery.
Biden and his supporters can rail at the unfairness of it all (that appears to be their current strategy) or they can recognize the two things going on here:
One, yes, much of the public has accepted a politically driven alternate reality in which inflation and unemployment are up (they’re actually way down), GDP growth, wages and the stock market are down (they are, respectively, up, up and at record highs) and America is in a recession (it’s not).
But, two, continued elevated prices for consumer goods are in fact real and hitting Americans where they live. There’s not a lot that any president can do about that, but pretending it’s a figment of people’s imaginations is no answer.
Camp Biden is palpably frustrated that he’s getting no credit for the many things going right in the economy.
On that score, they’re not wrong. A recent Harris poll for The Guardian paints a picture of a nation deep in the grip of anti-factual negative delusions when it comes to just about every economic indicator there is.
Most startling is that almost half the country believes unemployment is at a 50-year high, when, at under 4 percent, it’s actually at a 50-year low.
This and other polls also indicate that Americans wrongly believe the inflation rate is rising. That rate has fallen from its 2022 average of around 8 percent to less than half that today. But that’s a more understandable misconception, and one that’s apparently at the core of Biden’s political problems on the economy.
The inflation rate is a measure of how quickly prices are rising. But when the inflation rate drops, it doesn’t mean the prices people are paying for things come down — only that they’re going up more slowly than they were before.
That’s the right trend, but is of little comfort to Americans who have seen the cumulative prices of goods rise by around 20 percent, in all, during Biden’s tenure. Pointing out that those prices aren’t rising as fast as they were doesn’t make that bite any less painful.
For all the negativity on the issue, America’s economy today is in far better shape than most of its peer nations.
It’s more than fair for Biden to take credit where it’s due for his economic achievements. But on the issue of higher prices, he’d be wise to take another cue from Clinton, who famously felt Americans’ pain. That pain today is real. Voters would give Biden points for acknowledging it more forthrightly than he so far has.
