Biden’s a Good President. America Should Give Him the Chance To Be a Great One.

The Economy Sucks. Things Are Bleak. But America’s Best Chance Is a President Who’s Figuring Out How the World Can Have a Future.

Image Credit: Rebecca Cook, follow her here.

Soon, some time in the next week or so, Joe Biden’s going to announce his bid for re-election. And something strange, stupid, and painful will happen. Pundits will groan. They’ll trot out the same tepid not-quite-thoughts they’re infamous for. He’s too old!! they’ll groan. Hello, ageism. Yes, that’s a real thing, unless you think applying for a job in middle or old age is easy. He hasn’t done enough!! Americans don’t…don’t like him!! Tedious. Foolish.

Here’s the truth, and it’s a fact. Biden’s a good President. The best one America’s had in a long, long time. Americans should give him a chance to be a great one. Sorry. Stop right there. That’s not politics. Like I said, these are empirical facts. Let me prove it to you.

Everything in America’s politicized. Even…kids reading books. American media, which creates everything like some kind of sportsball game, is guilty of perpetuating this flimsy attitude. One thing that Americans should learn — again — is to think objectively. It’s an objective fact that Biden’s a good President, but I’m going to explain it in reverse.

Why are Biden’s approval ratings so low? It’s the economy, stupid. You see, Biden’s making a Big Mistake. One that Democrats are, sigh, renowned for. They talk up the economy. They always do. Under the rules of the amateurs who run their messaging — and I’m allowed to say that, because I helped run of the world’s biggest marketing agencies, and we’ll come back to all this — there’s a Big Taboo. You can’t ever say the economy sucks.

But the economy does suck. That’s a fact. It’s a hard fact, and a brutal one, and yet it has to be faced. The signs, if you just take a glimpse at reality, aren’t pretty. Here’s one that makes the economist want to screech like his hair’s on fire: “Americans Go Deeper Into Debt as They Use Buy Now, Pay Later Apps for Groceries.” That’s not just a bad sign, it’s a dire one. People going (deeper) into debt…by way of sketchy, last-ditch fintech mechanisms like buy now, pay later…to afford the basics? That’s about as bad and clear a sign an economy can send you: people are not doing well. They can’t make ends meet.

And yet if you listen to the Democrats, they…play this foolish game of boosterism. They refuse to acknowledge what’s patently obvious for anyone with eyes and a brain to see and take in and be a little horrified by: the economy sucks. But there are the Democrats, every day, they trot out a new figure, surrogate, talking head, to parrot the same old point: things are great! Never been better! It’s morning in America, folks!!

No wonder people don’t trust them when it comes to the economy. And because the economy is the biggest issue on people’s minds, their top priority, that’s not just a Very Big Problem — it’s a Colossal Mistake, an amateur’s mistake of politics, that is having awful consequences. Americans don’t trust Biden on the biggest issue of all, which is their futures.

But all of that just raises the question: should they? There are three sure things in life, death, taxes, and the Democrats sucking hopelessly at messaging. Should Americans let poor messaging obscure the facts for them? You see, the economy sucks, that’s true. But it’s not all that’s true.

The economy sucks for a reason. That reason is simple. Climate change. Why are prices skyrocketing? Because we’ve hit the planet’s limits. You’ve heard me discuss this a billion times, and it only gets truer every year. My fellow economists will tell you, breathlessly, that “inflation’s coming down!!” LOL — everyone that actually has to buy groceries, which isn’t Larry Summers, that’s for sure, feels the pain a little more every time they go to the supermarket. Prices coming down? Not for basics. They’re coming down for some things. But inflation for food? Energy? Household goods? All of which require vast amounts of biotic inputs? They’re way, way above “core” inflation. (Read more on this, including sources and links, here.)

We are beginning to experience the mega-scale effects of climate change, and they’re already catastrophic. The last few years of skyrocketing inflation? Good luck to you if you think it’s ever really coming down on a planet where harvests are now failing, rivers running dry, reservoirs running on empty, fields going up in flames, and the temperature still rising every year because, well carbon emissions are. If we don’t reinvent our economies? We do not have a future.

It’s a weird and sad thing, because in my field? Nobody will say it. Economists will look at a planet on fire, running out of water, energy, crops, and not notice a damned thing. It’d be funny, if it weren’t so painful. And because economists won’t say it, neither will politicians. Not really, anyways. Not enough. And because politicians won’t say it?

The far right is surging. Across the globe. You see, the far right does three things that the center left won’t. It acknowledges that the economy sucks. It acknowledges people are facing immense, pain, anxiety, and despair because of it, worried for their futures, their childrens’ futures, their communities, their livelihoods. And then it offers people an explanation.

That explanation, as we all know, is pointing the finger of blame at poor innocents. Scapegoating is the trend that’s already defined the 21st century. In Britain, Europeans are the scapegoats for the woes of the “real” Brit, in Europe, North Africans often are, in North Africa, it’s the rest of Africa. In India, it’s Muslims, in China, it’s not “real” Chinese, and so on. The world is playing a game of musical chairs of doom, because, well, everyone can’t be responsible for everyone else’s problems, and yet this is what all this scapegoating implies, only the center left is too weak, supine, and foolish to even point that much out, but I digress.