"Bidenomics": How the president came to embrace an economic insult

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published 2 July 2023

Speaking in downtown Chicago, President Biden permitted himself a conspicuously campaign-minded victory lap of sorts, telling attendees that he often encourages organized laborers he meets to "brag a little bit more about what you do" — while delivering a speech calibrated to do exactly that on his own behalf. Insisting he was "not here to declare victory in the economy," Biden nevertheless bragged that "we have a plan that is turning things around incredibly quickly." Repudiating the "trickle-down approach" of Ronald Reagan's eponymous "Reaganomics" the president instead touted his own rhetorical iteration: "Bidenomics" — a phrase plastered on signs and banners that surrounded Biden during his remarks.

The White House has embraced Bidenomics, a term from which the president himself has distanced in the past ("I did not come up with the name" he claimed Wednesday, adding that he was now "happy" to call it such). This embrace comes as a direct rebuttal to prevailing disapproval of Biden's economic policies; an Associated Press poll from last month showed only 33% of the country backed the president's handling of the economy. Bidenomics is "the word of the day, word of the week, word of the month, word of the year here at the White House," White House spokesperson Olivia Dalton said on Tuesday, ahead of Biden's Chicago speech. Between the president's remarks and the rest of the administration's full-throated backing of the term, it's clear that "Bidenomics" is intended to play a central role in Biden's reelection pitch to voters.

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Bidenomics, as the White House explained in a recent press release, is "an economic vision centered around three key pillars: Making smart public investments in America; Empowering and educating workers to grow the middle class; and Promoting competition to lower costs and help entrepreneurs and small businesses thrive." The platform is an overt rejection of the Reagan-era policies that cut taxes for the wealthy in the purported belief that the profits would simply "trickle down" to everyone else was a "failed approach led to a pullback of private investment from key industries, like semiconductors to solar," Lael Brainard, director of the White House Economic Council, explained on Tuesday. Instead, Bidenomics is "an approach that grows the economy from the middle out and the bottom up" with a particular focus on "growing the middle class," she added.

In reality, Bidenomics is "a bit all-encompassing" as a term — one which the White House is using to describe "a broad collection of policies aimed at using government muscle to revive and reshape the economy to help the middle class," Politico explained. Noting that Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon, the two White House advisors who distributed the administration's triumphant Bidenomics memo "are messaging experts and not economists," CNN said it's "a telling sign of the origins of 'Bidenomics' as partly a branding exercise." Still, there are concrete policies the administration points to as part of the broader, if somewhat nebulous, Bidenomics effect; the bipartisan $1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill has lead to tens of thousands of federally funded projects across the country, while maintaining a "strong domestic manufacturing base," the White House bragged; Biden also highlighted the "$500 million investment in the Good Jobs Challenge, which stems from the American Rescue Plan'' during a recent North Carolina visit, CNN pointed out, linking the initiative to the Bidenomics' second pillar of empowering and educating workers; the administration is also focusing on its record of "expanding high speed internet access and cracking down on industries that charge so-called junk fees," Politico said.

"The twist — and the challenge — is that for much of his presidency, Bidenomics has been a pejorative," The Washington Post concurred, adding that the term "has been used most frequently by conservative opinion writers" attacking the administration for inflation and exploding consumer prices. For instance, a 2022 Wall Street Journal Editorial Board op-ed on "Bidenomics 101" lampooned the president, calling it "embarrassing for the leader of the free world to sound like he's channeling Hugo Chávez," while insisting that Biden "doesn't appear to know anything" about economic policy. A year earlier, the conservative Washington Examiner ran an essay on the "three pitfalls of Bidenomics," concluding that "if you like higher prices and long lines at the pump, more people on the government dole, skyrocketing inflation, and trillions more added to the $28 trillion national debt, you are going to love four years of Bidenomics."

With the caveat that "the question of how strongly to tout the economy has vexed virtually every president running during a time of recovery," Politico said that the decision to co-opt "Bidenomics'' comes as the president "has pledged to avoid the missteps of his former boss, Barack Obama" whose 2010 "recovery summer" push largely fizzled by late August. Conversely, the Biden administration seems to have "learned a lesson" from the Obama White House's adoption of "Obamacare" — initially deployed as a conservative attack against the Affordable Care Act — in which "Obama's advisers realized that they should not let the Republicans own and negatively define the term 'Obamacare,'" and instead began using the term "with pride," Chicago Sun Times columnist Lynn Sweet wrote on the eve of Biden's Wednesday speech. As such, "Bidenomics" can in some sense be thought of as merely applying a comprehensive label to the fact that "Biden has been talking about how to grow the middle class for his own half century in top-level politics," CNN's Stephen Collinson wrote.

Faced with grim polling that shows a majority of the country disapproves of his handling of the economy so far, Biden and his team are looking ahead to the 2024 presidential election in the hopes that "new branding will provide a favorable contrast to the record of GOP frontrunner and former president Donald Trump, as well as a rebuke to the trickle-down Reaganomics embraced more broadly across the Republican presidential field," Politico said. "Biden is selling his program hard because he knows its first test will be political," agrees The Washington Posts' EJ Dionne. "The standing of Reaganomics was secured only after Reagan's reelection. The same will be true of the word Biden first resisted and now holds high."

Ultimately, Biden's electoral "Bidenomics'' pitch is a throwback to a traditional style of campaigning — perhaps no surprise given its roots-in-and-similarities-to both Reaganomics and Obamacare. While so much of Biden's messaging has been focused on framing himself as an avatar of normalcy in comparison to Donald Trump's agent of chaos, focusing on his economic achievements is "a conventional political approach against Trump," Collinson said. And should Trump not win his party's presidential nomination, Biden's campaign "has even more of an imperative to change poor public perceptions of his handling of the economy."

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Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.