Triple-Digit Trouble

I t finally happened: The price of filling up my Jeep crossed into triple digits.

I thought I could almost hear Mitch McConnell laughing, but, as everybody knows, Mitch McConnell doesn’t laugh. He smiles, sometimes, and it is terrifying.

A couple of days ago on the radio, Sean Hannity was raging about gasoline prices — “It pisses me off,” he said of the doubling of the price of filling up whatever it is you drive when you have a net worth in the neighborhood of $300 million. (Hannity is a shrewd guy, and he didn’t go on to wail about what it costs to fill up his Gulfstream.)

From one point of view, that is ridiculous. One rich person I know confesses to paying no attention at all to the price of gasoline: “What am I going to do? Not fill up my car?” And as Hannity himself conceded during his rant, the price of gasoline will have no effect on his day-to-day life. But he remembers a time in his life when he was living paycheck to paycheck, when doubling the cost of filling up the car he drove to work would have meant cutting back somewhere else in the household budget. I don’t think he’s alone in that — I think it probably is a pretty common sentiment. I feel it, too: 2022 Kevin isn’t terribly inconvenienced by the price of gasoline, but he is a little bit miffed on behalf of 1998 Kevin, who was broke.

(How broke? Ford Escort-with-185,000-miles-on-it broke.)

Because none of us is really Homo economicus, we respond to different price hikes differently. The other day, I got a bill for an MRI. (Nothing wrong, abundance of caution, etc.) The bill was for $400. That wasn’t my end after what insurance paid — that was the whole shebang. (My end was . . . $390. There’s a reason people hate insurance companies.) If I come back in six months and it’s $800 to get an MRI, I’m not going to get bent out of shape about it. The ongoing supply-chain disruptions have caused big spikes in the prices of many things that I use, some of them necessary and some of them elective. I suppose that a time will come when I don’t remember how inexpensive shotgun shells used to be.

But gasoline is a special commodity.

For one thing, many of us fill up at least once a week, so we’re constantly aware of gas-price changes. (Pre-pandemic, the majority of drivers filled up once a week; at the moment, they’re going a little more than two weeks between fill-ups.) After a week, you may not remember exactly what you paid for your last tank of gas, but you will remember that it was less. It’s a maddening drip-drop of price hikes. It’s not like traveling in Europe and suddenly noticing that you are paying two or three times what you are used to paying for gasoline — it’s a repeated little slap in the face accompanied by a sinking suspicion that prices are never going back down.

For another thing, we are Americans, which means that we are used to cheap gas and — more important — to going where we want when we want, and that we get very irritated when somebody stands between us and where we are trying to go. Americans hate toll roads, checkpoints, detours, traffic jams, and people who drive slowly in the fast lane. The fact that in Anno Domini 2022 I get delayed at every single traffic light because some idiot in front of me is on his phone and doesn’t notice that the light has changed fills me with . . . a lot more rage than it should. I used to put up with paying twice as much for rent on a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan as I now pay on the mortgage for a pretty nice house in Texas, and cheerfully endured 99 percent of what you have to put up with living in New York City, but when it became clear that the subways were never going to get back on track (so to speak), I moved.

That’s an American thing, I think: Sure, I’ll pay your stupid taxes, sit through your imbecilic diversity seminar, put up with all sorts of nonsense . . . but—just—get—out—of—my—way!

Whoever it was who dreamed up those little stickers of Joe Biden pointing to the price display and proclaiming “I did that!” that have appeared on gas pumps all over the country is maybe the greatest folk propagandist of our time. Banksy has nothing on that guy.

Democrats, Joe Biden above all, are whining that it is unfair that they are probably going to get wiped out in November because of inflation. Expect that whining to get worse as Election Day approaches. No, inflation isn’t 100 percent the fault of the Biden administration and its congressional enablers, but they have made it worse — and, if they had been lucky and come into power right before an economic renaissance, they wouldn’t have worried about whether it was fair to take credit for it.

There will be other issues that matter in the midterm elections. But the smart Republicans (I am told these still exist) are going to mention gas prices in every single speech — whether it is about the brutalization of Ukraine or runaway crime or anything else. “A manned mission to Mars? Are you crazy? Can you imagine what the rocket fuel would cost at these prices?” The rising price of gasoline isn’t an electoral magic bullet, but it is about as close as you can get to one.

Right now, our Democratic friends are having a series of hissy fits: about abortion, about gun control, about whatever it is that they’re going to move on to tomorrow. That’s the 1.8 percent of America that consists of angry partisans on Twitter. What is the rest of the country thinking about? For better and for worse, I think that what happens in November is going to tell us a great deal about where the people of this country really are and what they really care about. The political consultants are always going on about “kitchen table” issues, which were supposed to be Joe Biden’s forte but may now very well be his undoing.

And Biden isn’t going down alone.