Glad Ohio rejected Issue One last night. There is an old coaching axiom: “No gloating in victory, no pouting in defeat”. It will be interesting to see the breakdown of Ohio votes — it’s not just the big cities versus the farmers.
By the Numbers
Let’s look at the numbers. When Joe Biden was inaugurated as President of the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Index, a measure of the “health” of Wall Street, was 31,000. Today it’s over 35,300. On that same day, the unemployment rate was 6.7%. Today it’s about half that, at 3.5%. The inflation rate was 4.7%. Now, it’s just under 3%. And finally, the median household income was $70,074. Today it’s $70,784.
Thanks, Joe Biden.
There’s no question we had some economic “rocking and rolling” in the last two and a half years. Biden inherited the pandemic and the myriad of medical and economic issues we had to recover from. We went from lockdowns to wide-open in only a few months. The government did everything it could to cushion the economic impact on individuals and corporations (both Trump and Biden Administrations). So there were booms and busts, soaring wages and inflation, and shortages of all sorts of products from lumber to computer chips.
The Future
Everyone predicted that the recovery boom cycle would be followed by a crushing recession. But, from today’s perspective, we’ve dodged that bullet as well. The private economic advisors are saying that we will achieve the “soft landing” of our economic “plane”. It’s taken a couple of years to smooth out, but the numbers don’t lie. For most Americans, things are better today than they were on January 20th, 2021.
Thanks, Joe Biden.
We are improving the Nation, preparing for the next fifty years. We are building: roads and bridges, electric grids and fiber optic networks, computer chip production here in the United States, environmental improvements and more nationally protected lands. And when there’s a crisis, the Biden Administration can act quickly. The Pennsylvania I-95 bridge collapse is a great example; what should have taken months to rebuild, happened in three weeks. (And what about the East Palestine train derailment? Why did Ohio’s Republican Governor effectively keep the Federal government out by not asking for a disaster declaration: thanks, Mike DeWine?)
Thanks, Joe Biden.
Wedged Apart
Yet, we are mired in the detritus of the January 6th Insurrection. Our Nation is fascinated by a former President who waves top secret documents in the air and stacks them in his bathroom. And we are victims of political “wedge issues”. We spend so much energy arguing the “alphabet”: LGBTQ, DEI, CRT. Historians and Futurists warned for years that as we approach a population where White people are no longer the majority, now just a decade or so away, there would be a backlash. A segment of our Nation longs for the “good old days”, forgetting that those were the days when minorities were legally suppressed, criminally intimidated and even imprisoned.
Victimhood has become a potent political position. There are even some notable “mainstream” Republicans (see yesterday’s New York Times) who say that indicting the former President is so dangerous to our Republic, he should get a “pass”. Equal justice for all just shouldn’t apply to him. All of those are problems that Joe Biden hasn’t solved — yet.
2024 Election
Democratic operative James Carville defined Presidential politics simply back in 1995. When asked what his strategy for re-electing Bill Clinton was going to be, he said; “It’s the economy stupid”. If he’s still right, now twenty-eight years later, then the Biden 2024 campaign should be easy.
It won’t be. The wedges dividing us are so great, that it’s easy to focus folks on their grievances rather than their successes. And 30% of Americans are so enamored by the cult-like leadership of the former President, that they’ll never change, no matter how many times Trump is convicted. In fact, some threaten to revolt if he is.
Presidential decisions are supposed to be hard, and Joe Biden is faced with a Nation as divided as any since the pre-Civil War era. But, by the numbers, he’s doing all he can to make life better for every American, of all races and genders and political persuasions. As he keeps it up, the 2024 election should be an easy choice.
Thanks, Joe Biden.
