In the Times, Jonathan Weisman and Neil Vigor write:
Democratic candidates, facing what increasingly looks like a reckoning in two weeks, are struggling to find a closing message on the economy that acknowledges the deep uncertainty troubling the electorate while making the case that they, not the Republicans, hold the solutions.
No such message is available. It’s too late. If President Biden had come into office last year and resolved to address the economy as it actually existed, he might have got away with a lot of what came next. But he didn’t. Instead, he decided that the real issues facing the country were an inconvenience to his agenda, and he resolved to ignore them as a result.
The result was 18 months of hand-waving — it’s not going to happen; it’s going to happen but not much; it’s going to happen but not for long; it’s actually fine — coupled with a whole bunch of extraordinarily inappropriate policy measures that have made matters considerably worse. So utterly contemptuous have Biden and his party been toward inflation and its symptoms that, as late as August of this year, they still thought it would be a good idea to name a bill that they’d wanted for years the “Inflation Reduction Act,” and to hope that nobody noticed. Unsurprisingly, everybody noticed.
And now, two weeks before the midterms, they want to pivot back to the economy and insist that they feel everyone’s pain? Nah. The time for that has passed. This time, the pain is going to be theirs.