JOSH HAMMER: Biden Can’t Gaslight Struggling Americans Into Thinking His Economy Is Good

JOSH HAMMER: Biden Can’t Gaslight Struggling Americans Into Thinking His Economy Is Good

Josh Hammer on September 9, 2023

The 2024 Joe Biden presidential campaign, which has thus far been essentially nonexistent, is now out with a crisp 30-second TV ad titled, “Got to Work.” The ad, which targets local Michigan broadcasts and other national battleground states during this week’s NFL season opener, touts the 46th president’s first-term track record on such economic issues as “fixing supply chains” and “mak(ing) us more energy-independent.” The fact that this is the subject of Biden’s first major post-Labor Day advertising barrage confirms what was already fairly obvious: The president and his team intend to make so-called Bidenomics the focal point of their reelection campaign messaging.

There is just one glaring problem: It is all a lie. Biden can try to gaslight the American people and retcon the past few years to his heart’s content, but the evidence is simply overwhelming. The ruse will not work.

Last year, the U.S. economy formally entered a recession — which until 2022, when the Biden administration attempted to redefine the word, universally meant consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Around the same time last year, annualized inflation on the consumer price index surpassed 9% — the highest reading in four decades, since the infamous “stagflation” of the Jimmy Carter era. Inflation was particularly thorny for many basic household food staples, such as chicken and eggs, some of which experienced 20%-30% inflation at summertime 2022 peaks.

Inflation has since cooled down a bit, but is still running considerably hotter than the Federal Reserve’s stipulated 2% target. Accordingly, Fed Chair Jerome Powell has not ruled out still-further interest rate hikes, at a time when mortgage payments are already catastrophically high; for the median American family buying a home, mortgage payments doubled from roughly 14% of monthly household income in 2020 to nearly 29% in June 2023. That is the highest that particular metric has been in nearly four decades. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Russia have announced more oil production cuts through the end of 2023, at a time when the national average price of a gallon of gas is already near a record high.

Supply chains have not been “fixed” at all; on the contrary, Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the comically unqualified former mayor of Indiana’s fifth-largest (and crime-ridden) city who knows absolutely nothing about transportation, have overseen a historic supply chain disaster that has devastated importers and exporters, truckers and countless small businesses alike. Biden would prefer voters forget that many children missed their Christmas presents in 2021 precisely because of the very supply chain issues the senile gaffe-machine now falsely claims he “fixed.”

As for “energy independence,” no president in modern history has done more to make America more dependent on foreign energy. From his Inauguration Day blocking of the Keystone XL oil pipeline to his obstructing federal oil and natural gas leases to his overt (and failed) groveling of the Saudis — whose reform-oriented crown prince he outrageously blasted as a “pariah” on the 2020 campaign trail — to boost oil production, every energy policy President Biden has overseen has appeased the Left’s radical “climate change” wing and undermined the material interests of the American working class. Once upon a time, Biden might have styled himself blue-collar “Joe from Scranton,” but as an absentminded and senescent octogenarian without any remaining coherent convictions in place, he has revealed himself in the denouement of his life to be a cat’s paw of green lobby misanthropes.

The fact that Joe Biden’s paper-thin, basement-dwelling presidential campaign is rolling the dice with “Bidenomics” as its go-to message, as we approach the heart of the 2024 campaign cycle, can be explained by one truth: There is simply nothing else for him to run on. Surely it can’t be the unprecedented number of unvetted illegal aliens pouring cross the southern border; surely it can’t be the proliferation of narcotics, and the fact that roughly 110,000 Americans dropped dead last year of drug overdoses; surely it can’t be the epically botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, which saw 13 American servicemen die in vain and the Taliban flag hoisted over the old U.S. embassy in Kabul; surely it can’t be prized Biden Regime cultural fetishes, such as the barbaric “surgeries” of modern gender ideology. So Biden and his cackler henchwoman, Vice President Kamala Harris, will run on “Bidenomics.” And they will ask you not to believe your own lying eyes — to believe that the turd sandwich they are offering up is actually a tasty filet mignon. You just have to squint hard enough!

With any luck, that profound cynicism will soon come crashing into reality.

To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.