August 4, 2024

IT LOOKS LIKE A RECESSION IS COMING:

It’s mind-blowing that the Harris campaign would blame Trump for the poor jobs report and accuse him of “bringing us to the brink of recession.” He hasn’t been in office since January 20, 2021, and yet the current economy is now his fault?

Does that make sense to anyone?

While it is nonsensical to blame Trump for the jobs report, especially when Kamala has been claiming for years that “Bidenomics is working,” there is a method behind the madness.

An election year recession is devastating to the party in power. Case in point: McCain had a nearly three-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average before the economic collapse in September 2008. Stagflation also contributed to Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 over Jimmy Carter.

So, the Harris campaign is trying to push the narrative that Trump is to blame for the coming recession. Do they really think that will work? It’s a desperate and weak strategy that is destined to fail, but it’s the only play they have.

In 1992, the DNC-MSM portrayed a growing economy as “the worst in 50 years” to help Bill Clinton, only to admit after he won that, as the Charlotte Business Journal noted in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity. And we learned in hindsight that recession had actually already ended when the [September 1992 Time magazine] article was printed.” Time described it in December of that year as “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.”

In 2008, in order to crown Obama as the next FDR, the media focused on what Virginia Postrel dubbed at the time as “Depression Lust, and Depression Porn.” In April of 2020, Kurt Schlichter wrote, “The Democrats Totally Want A Depression.” Will their media outlets portray Biden-Harris’s stagnant economy as still quite good to prop her up or the end of the world in an attempt to blame it on the Bad Orange Man — who’s been out of office for four years?

Exit quote:

UPDATE: Salena Zito: Middle America rattled by jobs report.

Paul Sracic, political science professor at Youngstown State University, said political strategist James Carville was right when he said “It’s the economy stupid” when he centered former President Bill Clinton’s campaign on economic issues.

“As it was then and now, it is how people feel about the economy and if their lives are better that is driving this election,” he said. “The word recession is powerful. A lot of economics is psychological. The numbers that came out on Friday is very bad news for the Harris campaign. They were touting a soft landing last week and that is not going to happen now.”

Sracic said Biden and Harris both got the messaging wrong from the onset on the economy: “It began with inflation. They woefully underestimated inflation from the start, dismissing it as transitory. Maybe if they had reacted sooner, not understanding would not have become an overarching theme for them.”

Just think of it as “Milton Friedman’s Revenge.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll