What's going on
"I’m going to tell it like it is. I hope you can take it like it is."
Malcolm X, 1964"Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on (What's going on)
What's going on (What's going on)" Marvin Gaye, 1971
Every era needs a voice-over narrator, explaining things.
President Biden is handicapped in this term of office because he is not the primary narrator of what is going on in America. Trump, amid all his manifest faults, is extraordinarily good at gabbing the spotlight. He is the narrator. There is no stopping that.
Biden is not an invisible president. He may be approximately typical among 20th century presidents in headline-grabbing and visibility. He is comparable to Gerald Ford and both Bush presidents, less dominating than Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Biden offered us a return to "normal" and an America that didn't have Trump high drama chaos every day. We were tired of Trump and Biden was a relief. But Trump reset the standard for hair-on-fire look-at-me drama for a president, and he did not fade away. This remains an era of political chaos. That isn't Biden's fault, but he gets the blame. He didn't become the new, calm narrator. Trump is still around.
Gallup published this graph of consumer confidence in the U.S.
Let me narrate. Consumer confidence was high in 2019, pre-Covid. Then it plummeted with the March 2020, shutdown. Confidence hit a low in mid 2022 when gasoline and food prices dominated the news. Those prices are in our faces daily. Interest rates on home mortgages rose from rock-bottom to rates that felt high in comparison with a decade of much lower rates. Mortgage rates affect far more than just the small number of people buying or selling homes at any given minute. Most American homeowners have a mortgage, and most of them refinanced at some point during the long era of 3%-4% interest. They are aware of 7% interest rates because they feel relief atnotpaying it. They look back and feel they dodgedthatbullet back in those good-old days of Trump's presidency.
The narrative told by Trump is that he inherited "carnage" -- his word -- but that in three months it became the greatest economy of all time. In fact, Trump inherited from eight years under Obama trends that were very favorable -- low inflation and unemployment dropping -- but Trump did what Trump does; he narrated and took credit. He sold it. Then, 2020 came and it became a disaster starting in mid-March. Trump hid from Covid and mishandled most of it -- except fast-tracking vaccines -- but the American memory of Trump's America stopped at the end of 2019. Trump sold a story that Covid wasn't his fault. It was China's. So the economy of 2020 didn't count, not against Trump anyway.
But then, in 2021 when Biden was president, the frustration with the economic recovery not yet back to pre-Covid levels, the school closures, the mask and vaccination mandates all counted against Biden, and Biden did not narrate it differently. Americans got tired of Covid protocols long before Covid stopped killing Americans. Some of the Covid-theater was foolish: masks in restaurants, except while eating; government offices closed while grocery stores were open. Trump and red state governors jumped on that and blamed Democrats. Blue state governors were still thinking "public health" not "public frustration" so Democrats were slow to narrate a story of meeting public expectations on health. The CDC became a villain, not a lifesaver.
Frustration with the state of the country carried over from Covid to the economy. We are in recovery, with low unemployment, with rising economic output, with improved wages for entry level jobs, with a high market, with high home prices swelling the wealth of middle income Americans. We are not hearing that effectively narrated. Trump has a louder narration -- like a boom box in a subway car. It is unpleasant but passengers cannot fail to hear it. He says the economy is terrible. He points to the problems.
I don't blame Biden. We knew going in that Biden could never present a strong narrative that would compete with Trump. No president in history was as high-drama as is Trump. The situation is not hopeless for Democrats. Democrats have a giant pool of frustrated narrators-in-waiting, people whose careers have been stalled as they wait for Biden and others to leave the scene. There is no pulpit like the "bully pulpit" of the presidency. But in chess, three rooks and three bishops are more powerful than one queen. The Democrat who will lead the party in 2028 is alive and well today. I hope a half dozen of them step up now and go on the road. They won't talk with a single voice, which is a problem, but there will be a body language message coming out of it. Voters can vote for Biden for now, knowing he is surrounded by people ready to step up and who are telling the Democrats' story of what is going on. We are muddling through. Things are OK. America is on the mend and it has a president and congress capable of leading.
Democrats are normal and Trump and the House GOP are crazy.