return2ozmaJoe Biden "drives me crazy"—Former Obama strategist David Axelrod
jordanlundHe’s not wrong.
When potential voters are telling you how bad they have it, the correct response is NOT “Hey, what are you talking about, Jack? Economy is doing great!”
You would think he would have learned from Bill “I feel your pain” Clinton.
Ensign_CrabWait… people thought “I feel your pain” was sincere?
The thing is, sincere or not, he didn’t write off voters valid concerns. “It’s the economy, stupid!” and all that.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_the_economy,_stupid
Biden should have a statement along the lines of “Look, I know grocery prices are still up, but at least we’re not fighting for toilet paper like we were under Trump.”
Which would acknowledge a) yeah, things still aren’t where they need to be but also b) we’re doing better than 4 years ago.
I think a lot of the problem is that the current messaging is “look how great the economy is doing!” Which doesn’t ring true for people who have watched the price of everything but an hour of their work go up.
It’s galling to hear that we should be happy that billionaires have more yacht money because they’re gouging us.
Yes, exactly this.
What’s even worse is that you can look at comparisons of wages and inflation, and you can see that since early 2023, wages have been outpacing inflation. But even though that’s true broadly, on a statistical level, that’s not the way people are experiencing it. In other words, feelings don’t care about the facts. Things are genuinely getting better, and are better now under Biden than they were under Trump, and yet, that’s not how people feel.
Thank you for letting me know that my bank account is lying to me and that everything is great.
Anecdotal evidence isn’t evidence.
Cool. Tell people who are suffering that everything is great.
To point out the obvious, on any curve there are going to be people above/in front of the curve, and below/behind the curve. In the case of wage growth versus inflation, more people are currently beating inflation in their wage growth than there are people lagging. That’s the way statistics works; if nine out of ten people are beating inflation, then yeah, there’s going to be one guy that isn’t. Just like even when there’s record levels of employment, there are always going to be some people that just can’t seem to find a job.
You are behind the curve in at least two different ways.
This is shitty messaging, and it’s all democrats know how to do.
mozzYeah, I feel you on this. It's tough though. The accurate answer is "Dude I'm fucking trying, the house is on fire and we got 10% of it put out even while there's a whole gang running around lighting more fires. I'm proud of the 10% but if you got the help to give me to get more I'd fucking love it."
But it's tough to say that and not have it sound impotent. People are weird in how they judge statements. It may feel to him like his two choices are either "hey things are great" (which, they aren't) or else "yeah you're right it sucks" (which is terrible because it undercuts everything significant he's been able to do).