We interrupt our regularly scheduled gloom for these important news bulletins:
The jobless rate has dropped to a pandemic-low 4.6 percent, two years ahead of recent projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
In October the economy added more than half a million new jobs – exceeding all forecasts, and sparking the Dow and the S&P 500 to all-time highs.
In Joe Biden’s first nine months, the economy has added 5.6 million new jobs, dwarfing Donald Trump’s anemic four years.
Meanwhile, 70 percent of eligible Americans are now fully vaccinated (the ripple effects will boost the economy longer term), and shots are going into the arms of kids (a trend that will ease tensions at schools).
And the Biden administration has now pulled off two massive domestic reforms, the American Rescue Plan (cash payments to strapped households, remember?) and the infrastructure package, despite paper-thin Capitol Hill majorities and the obstructionist Republican cult – with hope still alive for the transformative and broadly popular safety net bill that would (among many other things) give working parents the child care help they need.
So Democrats should cheer up, right? There are promising sprouts in the arid soil, with enough time to reap a harvest before the ’22 congressional midterms…right?
Yes indeed. In theory.
The problem is, we’re talking about the Dems here. They’re not exactly geniuses at putting their best feet forward. All too often, they prefer to trip over their shoelaces – as evidenced most recently by their endless months of squabbling over price tags, to the point where most Americans with little patience for Capitol intrigue simply tuned out or paid scant attention to begin with. (After they finally passed infrastructure reform on Friday, Democratic congressman Mark Pocan said the whole process had been “a clusterfuck.”
Plus, the price of gas has gone up (for complex OPEC-driven reasons beyond the administration’s control), and if there’s one thing you can’t do in America, it’s mess with motorists’ Freedom. Plus, the global supply chain is screwed up (for complex Covid-related reasons beyond the administration’s control), and that has fed consumer inflation. The pandemic’s influence is obvious: There’s a pent-up demand for consumer goods, driven by homebound people who’ve saved money over the last 18 months by foregoing travel and restaurant meals. Biden acknowledges that the inflation concerns are real; on Friday, he stressed the need to “tackle the costs that American families are facing.”
Plus, the mainstream media hasn’t helped matters much when it posts stupid stories about the price of milk, focusing on a supposedly typical family that supposedly buys 12 gallons a week (do they wash their hair with it?), and laments that a gallon used to cost “$1.99.” (Yes it did…decades ago.) Plus, today we got this egregious gem of false equivalence from Maureen Dowd: “Many who were sick of Trump chaos and ineptitude are now sick of Biden chaos and ineptitude.”
But here’s the best way to illustrate the Dems’ biggest dilemma:
The sweeping infrastructure package, which now awaits Biden’s signature, will put big bucks into bringing broadband connectivity to Internet-poor rural red Americans…who will no doubt use it to more speedily connect with the anti-Biden, anti-vax, anti-“CRT,” anti-“socialist” sewage that’s pumped out daily with relentless precision by the MAGA disinformation operatives.
Those folks have become experts at concocting “narratives” across scads of “platforms” that prey on primal cultural grievances, both real and imaginary. Take a look at the Virginia gubernatorial race, where they marketed fear of CRT – critical race theory – even though many voters had no clue what it was and whether it was actually being taught in Virginia schools (it isn’t). Of course, this is not a new phenomenon – for decades, at least dating back to GOP junkyard dog Lee Atwater, the Republicans have gone for the gut while Democrats have targeted the head. Republicans stoke passion while Democrats trust in policy.
Kelly Dietrich, a former Democratic fundraiser who trains party candidates, reportedly says: “Democrats are losing the messaging war…We promised to solve problems, and rather than talk and brag and point out the fact that government is working the way it should – making sausage is messy – we’re bogged down in process, and in the meantime, the other side is capitalizing on issues that really matter to the day-to-day lives of voters.”
Those smiley-face bulletins I itemized at the top? Biden and his party would be well advised to sell the hell out of their achievements in time for the midterms, and demonstrate – with relentless messaging – that their enacted reforms are improving people’s lives. Only then will they have a fighting chance of trumping fear with facts.