Amid the gloom, you got to admit it's getting better.
"You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In Between."
Johnny Mercer, 1944
Joe Biden is miserable at self promotion. He paints a glass-half-empty message.
He can fix that.
We had a master salesman as president for four years, so of course Biden looks bad in comparison, but Biden is objectively bad at it. The overall tone from the White House is one of frustrations at legislation stalled, nominations blocked, COVID re-emerging. Biden makes things seem worse than they are. Then the Kabul airport, on top of all that.
Stock market. Amid the gloom, CNBC noted that the "major averages all finished higher for the month of August. The S&P 500 rose 2.9% for the month, rising for the seventh month in a row." The mood wasn’t that great , but we somehow hit new all time highs over 50 times this year. We are in a recovery. Indeed, a boom. Consumer confidence is up. Americans' IRAs and 401Ks are up.
Biden has an opportunity to tell a story of American building back better. The stock market rises and falls, but under Biden it has done very well. Is that sleepy incompetence? Here is the question he can ask: Are you better off today than you were a year ago? Almost certainly yes. What would Trump have done? We saw the answer. He took full credit for it. Biden has an opportunity here.
Unemployment rate. Meanwhile, here is a chart of the unemployment rate in the U.S. produced by the St. Louis Fed.
The chart goes back just over 12 years. The Obama years saw a long unbroken reduction of the unemployment rate. The Trump years continued this trend for three years, then the COVID spike to 15 percent. Notice an unbroken reduction in the unemployment rate during the Biden months. Workers are reconnecting with jobs. Burger King is advertising $15 an hour to start, entry level, they train. What would Trump do? We know. We saw him do it. He bragged about the declining unemployment rate. Biden can do it, too.
COVID. Meanwhile, during Biden's term of office the U.S. has risen to vaccination of 69% of America's adults.
That is something to be happy about. Biden shares this message, but he is not dominating the news with it. Instead the primary news story and mood is one of frustration for the Delta rebound, the crisis in the hospitals, breakthrough cases among the vaccinated, and the need for booster shots. Events on the ground have given Biden every opportunity to brag since there is a sharp partisan skew on who is getting vaccinated.
A poll by NBC news Click showed this breakdown of people vaccinated for COVID.
All adults-- 69%
Whites-- 66%
Blacks-- 76%
Latinos 71%
Democrats 88%
2020 Biden voters 91%
Republicans 55%
2020 Trump voters 50%
The vaccines appear to work, and team blue is getting the shot. Republicans have a hard message to sell: "They can't make you get a shot to keep you healthy, and besides, it is your right to spread disease." Team red is succeeding in frustrating team blue--a win for them--but it is doing so at the cost of filling hospitals and morgues, a losing strategy.
I observe an iteration of the reticence Obama showed about celebrating the improving economy during his term of office. Obama didn't dare sound happy lest it imply he didn't recognize ongoing problems. It was glass-half-empty thinking, and Biden has gone back to it. Trump showed us that reticence was unnecessary. People respond to leadership in framing. Trump told us he inherited "carnage" but then, after a couple of months told us everything is tremendous, the stock market up and unemployment down. It set a mood. People generally think Trump turned the economy around.
I saw something brand new in Biden's tone yesterday--Tuesday. He was adamant and unapologetic regarding Afghanistan. The place was a loser for America, he said, and now we are out, out, out! That was a new look for Biden. That tone may shift America's focus from the chaos at the end. It was the strongest piece of salesmanship I have seen in his presidency.
Biden can take one more lesson from Trump: Distract. Replace a difficult story with a better one, something this blog illustrated with images of a jet fighter sending out flairs to avoid heat-seeking missiles. Biden has very good messages to distract Americans from the Kabul airport. It's the economy, stupid. If he can sell this with the same firmness he showed yesterday, Biden can make people happy they elected him.
Are you better off than you were when Biden took office? Darned right.