Turn in your hymnals to…..
Inflation is down. In fact, it is down to four percent from its four-decade high of 9.1 percent last June, writes John Cassidy in The New Yorker. But that seems not to have penetrated public consciousness. President Biden is getting little credit for the improvement, pushed out of the headlines by the Trump indictment. Perhaps also, Cassidy suggests, because there are lags between numerical improvements and people’s perceptions. Biden’s approval ratings have not recovered like the economic indicators.
Egg prices have plummeted since avian flu sent them skyrocketing in 2022. But prices are still more than 80 percent higher than in January 2021.
“The price of gasoline is another example. At about $3.70 a gallon, the average price across the country has fallen considerably since last year’s peak of $5.10 a gallon,” Cassidy reports. “But the price is still well above its January, 2021, level, which was about $2.50 a gallon.”
Other consumer prices remain higher. Consumers still feel pinched:
Figures like these leave the White House in a bind. Even though inflation, job growth, and G.D.P. growth have all come in better than expected this year, Administration officials appear to be wary of bellowing the good news about the economy from the rooftops and getting accused of being out of touch. On Tuesday, when the inflation report was released, even the White House didn’t make much of it; the press office put out a statement in Biden’s name which hailed the numbers as “good news for hard working families,” but that was all. When Biden himself spoke publicly about the economy, on Thursday, his focus was on reducing hidden “junk fees”—a worthy initiative, but hardly a headline-grabber.
The White House may be being cautious yet might still nudge public consciousness in a more positive direction with repetition. But Democrats have never been great at horn-tooting.
Having been criticized in 2021 and 2022 for failing to react quickly enough to the rise in inflation, the White House clearly doesn’t want to get stung again. That’s understandable, but the media doesn’t face the same constraint. Last year, it provided blanket coverage of the inflation crisis, giving extensive airtime to inflation hawks like the Harvard economist Larry Summers, who said “we need five years of unemployment above five per cent to contain inflation.” Now that the inflation rate has come down further and more quickly than many so-called experts predicted, and without a big jump in the joblessness rate, surely the media should focus on this positive news, too.
Don’t count on it. Good economic news or bad, and even Republicans’ face-plant failures, always seem to be “bad news for Democrats” in the press. Washington press corps stenographers reflexively repeated then and repeat now Trump’s lies. Lies about himself and about Democrats. They might be retrained to amplify truths told by Democrats if only Democrats were as disciplined and relentless in repeating positive messages. But statistics are neither messages nor narratives.
What the left in general seems not to grasp is that data are not what matter to voters. What matters is Patrick Caddell’s insight that Rick Perlstein recounted in “Reaganland.” What matters more than data, even more than people’s personal economic fortunes, is how candidates made voters feel. Joe Biden in 1972, then 29 (he would turn 30 before taking office), won his Senate seat, in part, by following Caddell’s advice.
With his “it’s never ever a good bet to bet against America” rhetoric, Biden expresses a core belief that whatever the challenge, Americans are up to it. It is a reflex the rest of his party would be wise to train, because his relentless optimism cannot be as contagious as it could be, or as beneficial for Democrats’ prospects, without the rest of his party singing from the same hymnal.
Messaging authority Anat Shenker-Osorio recently told The Intercept’s Ryan Grimm, “as far as what you’re actually selling to voters, you want to sell the brownie, not the recipe. Meaning, you want to sell what the policy is going to deliver.”
What matters more is evoking in constituents a positive feeling about life in Joe Biden’s America vs. Donald Trump’s “carnage.” That requires more emotional intelligence than many on the left have developed the chops to accomplish. But it’s not too late to learn.