With Kamala Harris likely to be the Democratic presidential nominee, Donald Trump and his supporters are going to make the case that she is as responsible for the track record of the White House during the past nearly four years as is Joe Biden.
Fair enough.
Harris was Biden’s loyal vice president, she routinely supported his policies, and he endorsed her to take his place on the 2024 ballot when Biden decided to withdraw due to concerns about his age and his cognitive and physical decline.
Biden’s record as president, though, is not necessarily the “disaster” that Trump tries to label it.
Certainly, there were rough spots. The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan early in Biden’s tenure was a hot mess. The Democrat went too far in relaxing immigration controls on the southern border that Trump had imposed, and the resulting flood of immigrants from Central and South America overwhelmed this nation’s abilities to manage their numbers or control the masses who risked entering the country illegally.
And then there was the problem of high inflation, which this country had been somewhat miraculously able to avoid for decades until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, creating supply chain problems, labor shortages and gobs of federal money thrown to individuals and businesses — all of which combined to drive up prices and kept them inflated until leveling off this past year with an annual inflation rate of about 3%.
But there were plenty of successes, too, and Biden enumerated several of them in his letter to the American people announcing his decision to end his reelection campaign.
“We’ve made historic investments in rebuilding our Nation, in lowering prescription drug costs for seniors, and in expanding affordable health care to a record number of Americans. We’ve provided critically need care to a million veterans exposed to toxic substances. Passed the first gun safety law in 30 years. Appointed the first African American woman to the Supreme Court. And passed the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world.”
He could have also added that unemployment remains historically low, workers have seen their wages rise faster than normal, and the stock market has been doing well, as anyone who has paid attention to their 401(k) should know. According to Forbes, the S&P 500 index has posted an annualized gain of 10.8% since Biden took office in 2021. That’s not as good as the 14.1% under Trump, but most investors other than the greedy are going to be fine with double-digit annual returns.
The problem that Biden had, though, was telling his story. That’s partly because of his own ineffective messaging — as demonstrated at the disastrous debate with Trump that precipitated the incumbent’s eventual pullout — and partly because the nation was concentrating mostly on whether the 81-year-old president was fit to handle a second term.
With that concern now resolved, Harris should be able to more effectively make the case for the Democrats’ successes and turn up the heat on Trump for his own many failings, such as his impeachments, indictments, criminal conviction and civil judgments.
Running on Biden’s record might actually do Harris more good than Trump running on his.
