It's The Economy, Stupid (But Not If It Helps Democrats)
The media's double standard is in full force and is only going to get worse.
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In 1992, political strategist James Carville coined the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid” as a way to focus Bill Clinton’s campaign. Since then, it’s become a shorthand for how we talk about presidential politics. Why? Because it’s true. Generally speaking, when the party in power has a solid economy, it doesn’t lose. When the party in power has a rocky or failing economy, it doesn’t win.
A lot of this has to do with the public. If the economy is strong, people are happy, and they do not punish the party in power. If the economy is weak, they do, regardless of whether the party in power is to blame or not.
That was back when the press reported accurately on the economy. But those days are long gone. Now? Now we have this:
Yeah. That’s the world we live in today. We are in the middle of the strongest economy in more than half a century. The longest streak of low unemployment since the 60s. Wage growth is up. Inflation is gone. The mere suggestion of a congressional investigation into price gouging sent the price of groceries tumbling. The price of gas is under $3 nationally.
The United States recovered from Donald Trump’s maliciously incompetent bungling of Covid better than every country in the world. Joe Biden’s policies didn’t just put us on the road to recovery, they turbocharged a long-moribund economy held hostage to 40 years of Republican supply-side nonsense.
And yet…the press put so much effort into burying that truth under deliberate misinformation that only now is the public starting to recognize that we are not, in fact, in a recession. A recession that never existed. A recession that people only think happened because the press went to insane lengths to manifest one and when that didn’t happen, they did the next best thing: They tricked the public into thinking one was happening anyway.
It’s really hard to overstate how deliberate this was.
Since the minute Joe Biden was inaugurated, the press ran constant articles about how a recession was going to happen ANY FUCKING SECOND. It asked in multiple headlines, “Are we in a recession?” knowing full fucking well that we were not.
Finally, they just invented the “vibecession” so they could completely ignore every economic indicator pointing in the right direction and focus on how people “felt.” How did they feel? They felt bad. Why did they feel bad? Because the press told them that everything was terrible. The press then reported on these feelings as if they had nothing to do with them. This allowed the press to write hundreds of articles reinforcing a fictionalized version of the economy where everything was bad because people “felt” bad. Thus, the press perpetuated the illusion that something was wrong when in fact there was not. It was a widespread concerted effort.
They did this for a very specific reason: Donald Trump had no chance of winning against the best economy in half a century. It wouldn’t even be a race if the press told the truth.
Never mind telling the truth about how Trump had left the economy a flaming wreck and Joe Biden fixed it. Just telling the public how strong the economy actually was would guarantee Trump would lose in a landslide. The American people do not punish presidents who deliver on “jobs jobs jobs.”
On top of that, Biden delivered on wages and healthcare and unions and just about everything the press used to pretend were THE most important things in an election. But we didn’t talk about that because that stuff wasn’t important anymore.
Hell, a record-breaking stock market magically lost its appeal to the press. The same press that slobbered over Trump’s economic studliness when the stock market did well (before collapsing) during his presidency. If someone can explain why the Dow brushing up against 30,000 under Trump was cause for wild celebration but cracking 40,000 under Biden was met with yawns, I’d love to hear it. Please, run it down for me like I’m 5 years old.
What does this mean for the future? Nothing good.
Biden has set massive economic forces into motion. If (when) Harris wins, she is going to inherit an economy primed to expand beyond anything we can imagine. We’ve invested billions into building factories. In the next couple of years, those factories will be finished and then tens of thousands of high-paying job openings will be available in parts of the country long neglected. We’re looking at a renaissance in manufacturing across the Midwest. These jobs cannot be outsourced. That’s the point. The money from those jobs will, in turn, boost local businesses which will then hire more people who will then have more money to spend and so on and so forth.
At the same time, Harris and the Democrats will continue to pour money into infrastructure. This money will go into communities everywhere, more good paying jobs that cannot be outsourced, and the knock-on effects to boost local economies. Union membership will continue to grow, bringing up wages, benefits, and job security.
The Trump tax cuts for billionaires go bye-bye, bringing hundreds of billions in revenue back into the treasury. Remember the IRS being fully funded? Hundreds of billions more reclaimed from rich tax cheats.
Republicans will be hard-pressed to interfere with any of this and that’s just the baseline.
So what’s the problem? All of this is good, yes? It is! This means the press will work non-stop to erase it from the public’s view. They’ll have to or whichever lunatic the GOP runs in 2028 won’t just lose to Harris, they’ll be slaughtered. A 2024 loss is bad for the GOP and the press. A 2028 loss is terminal and cannot be allowed.
I want to be wrong but the press has done nothing to earn the benefit of the doubt.
After this election and the coming coup attempt are over and President Kamala Harris is sitting in office, we need to take a pause, breathe, and then get back to work punching the press in the face every single day. They have spent the last decade enabling fascism and they’re getting worse. They’re supposed to speak to truth to power but have forgotten that they serve the public good.
Last week, Maggie Haberman, one of the top propagandists at the NYT, cried big sobby tears about how mean the left has been to the press. Breaks my heart, truly. But the fact that she’s Big Mad about it means that we’re getting under their skin. They’ve been ignoring us for years and only listening to the right’s disingenuous “liberal media” bullshit because it served their interests.
Keep punching them in the face and maybe, just maybe, they’ll hesitate to lie through their teeth about the coming Harris economy. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll go back to reporting the news instead of trying to invent it. If they can’t do that, if the press can’t report the truth because their business model needs Republican chaos, then we have to drive them out of business and let media outlets not dependent on fascism take their place. It really is that simple.
There are 42 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it. This is America. No kings. No weirdos. Vote Harris and Walz.
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Another focus for the Harris-Walz Administration should be to super-charge Public Broadcasting. We need that Fourth Estate back. 😎✌️
This reminds all of us what a HUGE oversight it was when Republicon billionaires started buying up all available media outlets. As a result, they have controlled the narrative for over a decade with constant prevarication by those outlets.
Substack is a safe space to discuss ideas and policies that affect us all. To hell with the MSM!