When you are a top Democrat and even Barack Obama’s crew is turning on you, you know you are in bad shape. And that’s just where Joe Biden is sitting, only months ahead of the coming 2022 midterm elections.
The latest signs of trouble for Biden are cutting remarks by Larry Summers, a Harvard professor, economist, former treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama.
Appearing on CNN — which has been the safest of safe places for Biden — Summers said that America’s economic pain will continue for at least a year. This is the worst news for Biden, especially considering the White House narrative has been that this is all “transitory.”
Summers told CNN’s Biden-shilling Don Lemon that he would be shocked if inflation goes away in less than a year.
Summers told CNN, “we’re still going to have inflation for quite some time to come,” Breitbart News reported.
This is not just a blow to Biden for the midterms, it is also bad for him going into his putative re-election campaign in 2024. If inflation remains past the 2022 elections and the economy continues spiraling downward as the 2024 election season approaches, it will drag him down something awful.
Summers wasn’t done delivering the bad news.
“I’d be very surprised if we didn’t still have inflation at a meaningful rate a year from now. It may well come down,” Summers continued. “I think it’s probably likely to come down from the 8%-plus range that it’s been at, but we’re still going to have inflation for quite some time to come. And we’re probably going to have a slowing economy as well, so there’s going to be an element of what people call stagflation in our situation.”
The hits kept coming, too.
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“But, look, Don, what we need to do as a country is not shed tears over where we are,” he added.
He then went on to make suggestions to fix the economy, some of which Biden has already ruled out.
“We need to roll up our sleeves and address the problems, and that means doing things to control demand, to make life more affordable for families,” Summers said, “by reducing pharmaceutical prices, by doing everything we can to increase energy supplies, by doing what we can with respect to maintaining a flow of goods into the country by getting rid of nonstrategic tariffs so we can bring down prices, and we need to be patient and we need to look beyond the near-term economic distress to build the greatest economy that there’s ever been by strengthening our infrastructure, by taking account of the remarkable technological progress that there has been.”
All of this is a knife to Biden’s gut, just as he needs support for the midterms.
But this isn’t the only top Democrat saying things that are giving Biden heartburn. His own treasury secretary ––who was also Obama’s Fed chief — recently admitted that she was wrong about inflation being transitory.
“I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take,” Yellen told CNN early this month. “As I mentioned, there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy that have boosted energy and food prices and supply bottlenecks that have affected our economy badly that I didn’t — at the time — didn’t fully understand, but we recognize that now,” Yellen added.
The behind-the-scenes attacks are coming in so thick that many Democrats are even wondering if they can find a way to ditch Biden in 2024.
Politically, Joe Biden couldn’t be in worse shape. Sadly, the country is in far worse shape.
