Originally posted February 15, 2022.
American households, thanks to inflation, are getting poorer. In real terms, households are less well off than they were a year ago, writes Oliver Wiseman in Spectator.US. If people are doing as well as the President claims they are, why isn’t Joe Biden getting more credit?
When Biden isn’t insulting reporters, as he did when Fox’s Peter Doocy had the chutzpah to ask a rather standard question about inflation, Biden continues to make the “absurd claim that its Build Back Better spending package would have helped bring down prices,”
Let’s accept the White House’s (bananas) logic that trillions of dollars in increased public spending would be deflationary. The bill doesn’t have the votes in Congress. It’s a nonstarter.
Inflation may be difficult to solve, as a large part of the policy response rests on the Federal Reserve.
But the politics of inflation requires more than a shrug from the President. While there may not be a big red button sitting in the Oval Office marked “lower prices,” the White House could at least appear to take the problem seriously. Biden could reallocate some of his time to hauling execs into the West Wing to thrash it out, donning a hardhat and heading to the ports, talking through a plan to lower gas prices.
America is stuck with a president who is angry and sneering whenever anyone mentions the country’s number one economic problem, Mr. Wiseman reminds readers.
A change of approach may or may not actually help fix the problem of rising prices, but it would at least put some much-needed deflationary pressure on Biden’s steadily increasing disapproval numbers.
In the WSJ, Joseph Epstein accuses Joe Biden of lacking something central in his speeches – the same thing that is missing in Joe, the man from Scranton. Gravitas.
Mr. Biden simply doesn’t have gravitas in him. In his political career he has always seemed less a public servant than an operator, less a president than a backroom politician. Yet, thanks chiefly to American voters’ deep repugnance toward Donald Trump—surely more than half of Mr. Biden’s 81 million votes in 2020 weren’t for him but against Mr. Trump—Joe Biden ended up president.
One of Mr. Biden’s problems is that we don’t know what he truly believes. He ran for office as the great healer, the man who would bring the country back to the center after the stormy Trump years.
Yet since he attained office, that Joe Biden has disappeared, and now often appears to be the spokesman for the Democratic Party’s divisive left wing.
A Leaderless U.S.?
Mr. Biden, without solid principles, without clear policies, comes across as so unpresidential, continues Mr. Epstein.
Can there be any doubt that having so unpresidential a president has contributed greatly to the deflating sense of hopelessness that seems to have swept over the country?
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