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As public confidence in president Joe Biden’s ability to manage the economy continues to slide, he has adjusted his public comments to show empathy for households coping with ever-rising prices, The Wall Street Journal noted.
Last July, he said that higher prices “were expected and expected to be temporary”; in September, he said “there is a lot of evidence that gas prices should be going down but they haven’t.”
By November, his comments were becoming more personal: “Everything from a gallon of gas to a loaf of bread costs more and it’s worrisome, even though wages are going up.”
“I grew up in a family where the price at the pump was felt in the kitchen,” he said last week. “Everybody knew. Everybody felt it. I understand.”
Nervous Democrats have been urging Biden to address people’s personal struggle with inflation ahead of this year’s midterm elections, in which Democrats already are predicted to fare poorly.
Biden has said he will work with Congress to lower gasoline prices when Russia invades Ukraine and global oil supplies shrink, but he has not identified specific legislative measures he would propose.
Republican politicians and some economists have argued that Biden’s $1.9-trillion stimulus measure Congress passed last year has fueled inflation by giving consumers more money to spend at a time when goods are in short supply, pushing up prices.
Although several economic measures have improved during Biden’s term in office, “people aren’t feeling it,” David Axelrod, a key Obama political strategist, said to the WSJ.
“You can’t, with charts and graphs, make them feel better,” he pointed out.
Inflation was the greatest concern among respondents in a recent Quinnipiac survey, cited by 27 percent, followed by immigration with 12 percent and the COVID virus at 10 percent.
Democrats should “not talk about Nobel laureates” and their views on the economy’s progress “because no one cares,” Rep. Sean Patrick Murphy (D-N.Y.) said in an MSNBC interview last week.
“Talk about the price of a gallon of milk,” he urged. “Talk about the price of a gallon of gas.”
TREND FORECAST: “It’s the economy, stupid.” And as Gerald Celente has noted, and our 25 January Trends Journal illustrates, “When all else fails, they take you to war. And war time it is!
What his speech amounted to was nothing. It fell on deaf ears. Indeed, Biden has a 41 percent approval and 53 percent disapproval rating according to a Real Clear Politics poll.
And, it should be noted that the divisive Donald Trump’s 2018 approval number edges out Biden at 41.4 percent.
Again, as we continue to forecast, the United States, as with many Western nations, are ripe for new anti-establishment political movements. The poll numbers prove it.