Bidenomics Without Regrets – WSJ

“I am always going to look out for New Hampshire first, which means I will criticize the president when I think he’s wrong,” added Ms. Hassan. She noted her disapproval of the president’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the lack of security at the southern border and her opposition to the current FDA commissioner.

A former governor and state senator, Sen. Hassan is facing a surprisingly strong challenge from a political newcomer, retired U.S. Army Gen. Don Bolduc. Betting markets still say that Sen. Hassan will be re-elected but polls have tightened. A new survey from St. Anselm College even shows Republican Mr. Bolduc with a 1-point lead, within the poll’s margin of error, as the candidates prepare for their final debate on Wednesday night—also at St. Anselm.

Perhaps thinking that the first lady is more palatable to independent Granite Staters than the president, Ms. Hassan campaigned last weekend with Jill Biden. Meanwhile the senator’s advertising has noted her willingness to stand up to

Joe Biden.

The challenge for Ms. Hassan as she attempts to create the perception of distance between herself and an unpopular president is that inflation has soared and she has been a reliable vote for the Biden spending surge that inflamed it. On Tuesday she gave voters little reason to think she will stop voting for the Biden spending agenda if she’s re-elected.

When asked if she wishes she had opposed the President and voted against the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” in March 2021, given that even former Obama administration economists say it was inflationary, she responded on Tuesday:

So if you take a step back and you see inflation is a global phenomenon driven mostly by supply chain disruptions and labor shortages caused by the pandemic and the war, I think that’s where we have to focus our efforts. Short term, we help people lower the costs we can help them with right now, everything from heating their homes to affording prescription medicines and getting a tax break for making energy efficiency improvements in their homes. You do that and then you look at the underlying causes of inflation and that’s why we passed the CHIPS and Science act and the bipartisan infrastructure act.

Subsidizing the semiconductor industry addresses the underlying causes of inflation? Ms. Hassan is essentially endorsing the White House view that Covid and Russia are largely to blame for inflation, rather than Washington’s historic spending and money creation binge. When pressed on whether she had any regrets about the 2021 Biden bill for which she provided an essential vote, Ms. Hassan said:

Look, what has been important is that we were able to keep businesses open and people employed at the height of the pandemic and got critical funding to law enforcement and first responders and to our schools so that they could reopen and stay open.

Again, this has been the White House line since 2021, when the president falsely presented the economy as in crisis and in need of massive federal “rescue.” But when Ms. Hassan voted for the $1.9 trillion blowout, the economy was approaching the end of a quarter in which GDP grew at an annual rate of more than 6%, which was the third straight quarter of robust growth following the 2020 shutdowns. Also, now everyone knows what some of us knew at the time—schools did not need massive new funding to reopen and stay open. They simply needed politicians and public health authorities to stop exercising poor judgment and start studying the costs and benefits of locking kids out of classrooms.

“We’ve got to stop the crazy spending,” says the plain spoken Mr. Bolduc.

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Biden’s Midterm Message?

The White House may be concerned that a Democratic drubbing at the polls next Tuesday will inspire liberal pundits to begin assessing the party’s post-Biden leadership possibilities bright and early on Wednesday morning. A new dispatch from the swamp suggests that Mr. Biden is still living the dream and raring to run. Michael Scherer and Tyler Pager report in the Washington Post:

President Biden and first lady Jill Biden have been meeting since September with senior advisers at the White House residence to prepare a potential 2024 reelection campaign, according to multiple people familiar with the planning…

Biden, who would turn 86 before the end of a second term, has not yet made a final decision on another presidential campaign, his advisers say, but he has indicated publicly and privately that he intends to run barring an unforeseen event…

Top White House advisers Anita Dunn, Mike Donilon and

Jen O’Malley Dillon,

who played senior roles in Biden’s 2020 campaign, have been involved in the planning discussions with Biden, as has Chief of Staff

Ron Klain.

While Biden’s advisers have been focused on the midterms, Dunn and O’Malley Dillon have spoken with veterans of the past two Democratic presidential reelection campaigns, including

Barack Obama’s

campaign managers, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, and two veterans of

Bill Clinton’s

administration, Bruce Reed and

Steve Ricchetti,

who now work in the White House.

It seems the gang’s all here among the party’s political pros, but how many of them really think Mr. Biden should run again?

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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