Last week, inflation fell below 3 percent for the first time in three years, the S&P 500 had its best week of the year, and a deal was announced that will lower the prices Medicare and its beneficiaries pay for 10 of the most commonly used drugs.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that despite the extravagant promises made by both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump this past week, it could be a long time before the next president has a week with as much good economic news as the last one.
And that brings us to the man who was honored on the first night of the Democratic Party Convention, the man whose withdrawal from the candidacy sparked a storm of enthusiasm among Democrats, the man Trump can’t get away from: Sleepy Joe, Dark Brandon, President Joe Biden.
“For a long time, I was just too young,” Biden, who became a senator at age 30, said last week in his first joint appearance with Harris after dropping out of the race. “Now I’m just too old.”
Despite all the unconfirmed reports of his bitterness, Biden came across as someone who had had a huge weight lifted off his shoulders. He has six months left in office and some big ambitions, so it may be too early to make sweeping statements about his career. But it’s not too early to list what we’ll miss when he’s gone.
This process has not really begun yet. The Trump campaign is still running a commercial in which Harris praises Bidenomics. As if that were a bad thing in the face of a soft landing. The Harris campaign team, for its part, has signaled that it wants to make a clear break with the president on economic issues, although much of her economic program sounds like his initiatives, only faster and more comprehensive.
Trump made a series of sweeping promises in Asheville, North Carolina, last week in a speech billed as an economic speech. After promising to cut energy costs by 50 to 70 percent within a year, or perhaps 18 months, he made a telling correction midway through his speech: “If that doesn’t work, you’ll say, ‘Well, I voted for him, and he still cut costs significantly.'”
So much for strict accountability. Trump seems to understand that voters’ opinions on economic issues are now so strongly influenced by party affiliation that, like horseshoes, it is enough to get close.
Trump has also fantasized on Truth Social about an embittered Biden coming to the convention in Chicago and trying to wrest the nomination back from Harris. It’s important to remember that Trump was already focused on Biden in 2017, when he made the famous call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Biden is the only politician Trump has run against, other than Hillary Clinton. These nightly, all-caps postings seem to reflect his genuine shock at suddenly running against someone else.
The most common view in the polls this year was that both candidates were too old, and the June 27 CNN debate in Atlanta ensured that Biden would be the first, but perhaps not the last, to feel the inevitable impact. This election has so far been a referendum on generational change, and Biden’s decision to drop out was the first result.
We can now start the media countdown to the first wave of reports that Washington is losing its institutional memory. This was bound to happen anyway, with the departure of many experienced administration officials from Biden’s generation. But precisely because Biden’s experience has been so underestimated, it will be noticeable if we do not have a leader whose personal knowledge of the Middle East, for example, goes back to Gold Meir.
