A strong economy and dubious Democrats may re-elect Trump
Enlarge Image
Getty Images
MORE FROM:
JOHN PODHORETZ
How we already know the Mueller report found nothing on Trump
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘psycho’ class war
A mayor is surging in Democratic 2020 polls — and it’s not Bill de Blasio
If Dems and NeverTrump don’t move on after Mueller report, they’ll re-elect the prez
Democrats want to change the rules because they aren’t winning anymore
The news that the economy grew at a 3.2 percent rate in the first quarter of 2019 marks a surge of unexpected activity that threatens one likely Democratic narrative against President Trump’s reelection — the narrative that Trump has only been good for the rich, that most of the country is caught in an economic malaise or worse and that the Democrats can do better for the American people.
We have seen this playbook used before at a time when Democrats were seeking to unseat a GOP president. In 1984, Democrats looking to beat Ronald Reagan hoped with all their hearts that the economic woes of the country in the first two years of the his presidency would incline the public to reject him.
“When the American economy leads the world, the jobs are here, the prosperity is here for our children,” Walter Mondale said as he accepted the Democratic nomination for president that year. “But that’s not what’s happening today. This is the worst trade year in American history. Three million of our best jobs have gone overseas.”
Mondale dwelled on trade deficits because he didn’t have much else to dwell on by that point. In 1983, the economy had grown by 4.6 percent. In 1984, it grew by 7.2 percent. By Election Day 1984, an unemployment rate that had crested above 10 percent in 1982 had fallen to 7.2 percent. This was an economic recovery of a remarkable sort.
Will the Trump economy chug along above 3 percent until Election Day 2020 — or do better? The wise men tend to say no, that it’s been a decade since we had a recession and we’re overdue for one now. But the wise men of their day didn’t predict the size and scope of the Reagan boom either.
What’s different now is that Trump took office in 2016 with an economy whose recovery from a brutal recession was abnormally slow and weak, owing to the growth-unfriendly policies of the Obama administration.
Therefore, the classic business-cycle idea that we are “due” for a recession might not work in this case, because the pre-Trump economy didn’t grow as one might have expected it to and that the economy is neither overheating nor getting too big for its britches. It might indeed continue to chug along.
Which would mean we would have healthy economic growth and an astonishingly low unemployment rate in 2020. The only real danger lurking there is inflation, and the Federal Reserve is far too paranoid about inflation to allow it to creep up unannounced.
What will Democrats do if 2020 is like 1984? They will continue to talk about how Trump’s policies have only benefited the rich, given the success they have had (according to polls) in convincing people the Trump tax cut went only to the wealthy when, in fact, 65 percent of all Americans paid less in taxes in 2018 than they did in 2017.
But at some point this argument will fail. If the economy is good — if people make more money and have more job mobility — you will be unable to talk them into believing the economy is bad.
SEE ALSO
The 1984 scenario isn’t the only one that threatens Democratic hopes in 2020. How about the 1996 scenario, when the oldest man ever to secure his party’s nomination for president — Bob Dole — told America he came from a better time and would restore the country to the way it was before the upstart in the White House took us on the wrong path?
Isn’t this what Joe Biden’s message will be as well?
And then there’s 1972, the year the party nominated a hard-leftist who was advocating semi-socialist economic policies while liberal intellectuals were condemning the Nixon administration’s law-and-order policies for being too tough on criminals.
Last week, Bernie Sanders came out for giving felons in prison the right to vote, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff tweeted this: “What’s the reason NOT to let incarcerated people vote? Shouldn’t the people most affected by unjust laws have some say in electing people to change them?”
In other words, the deputy to the Democratic Party’s flashiest rising star is arguing that murderers and burglars and the like are “the people most affected by unjust laws” — the ones that sent them to the hoosegow in the first place.
Richard Nixon received 61 percent of the vote in 1972. George McGovern received 37 percent of the vote. If Democrats want to run on crazy, as they did 47 years ago, they can’t say history didn’t warn them of the potential consequences.
No comments:
Post a Comment