OPINION:
If President Joe Biden wants to be reelected, he had better figure out how to work with Republicans in Congress.
Hardly any political observer—short of places like the New York Times—give the Democrats much chance of holding the House. The Senate is up for grabs owing more to poor GOP candidate choices in key states than the popularity of progressive policies.
The new House will have a more hard-left Democratic caucus. With polls showing 70% of Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction, Mr. Biden has two choices. He can continue to align his policies and appointments to appease the hard left, which has earned him a job approval rating lower than a snake’s belly, and a personal approval about as low as former President Donald Trump.
The alternative is for the president to triangulate. He can work with Republicans to moderate his policies on inflation, the cost of living squeeze faced by middle and working-class voters, and preempt a crisis in his policy toward the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Mr. Biden needs to stop pretending that releasing several million barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve, embroidering at the edges of the housing and prescription drug market, or relying on Federal Reserve tightening can fully address inflation.
Automakers are moving as fast as they can to put EVs on the street, but oil consumption will continue rising owing to constraints on lithium and battery production. His much-celebrated Inflation Reduction Act subsidies will only serve to pushup sticker prices and fan inflation.
The president should work with moderates in Congress, perhaps with the help of a few sitting and former Governors—New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul and Maryland’s Gov. Larry Hogan come to mind—to sketch a realistic timeline for the converting of the auto fleet through the 2030s. And discuss frankly with the oil industry its leasing needs and put both into policy.
Upcoming elections will turn on suburban-middle-class women and Hispanic voters, and they are smarting from high gas and grocery prices.
The issue that catches the attention of among women is childcare, but the plan in Build Back Better would have made it more accessible to the working poor while actually raising costs and shrinking availability for middle-class women.
Higher prices and shortages for a service vital to middle-class working mothers are not a good anti-inflation or political strategy.
More reasonable and attractive would be to partner with Sen. Mitt Romney, who has proposed a rather thoughtful and affordable child allowance. That money could be used to purchase child care or to supplement family incomes for the 50% of women with offspring under 18 that would prefer to take care of their families at home.
Working with Sen. Romney directly to come up with a child tax credit would give Mr. Biden some political traction and a solution they could push through the new Congress.
The war in Ukraine is a political time bomb.
Western sanctions may deindustrialize Russia in the long run but near-term, high oil prices and China and India’s willingness to purchase its oil underwrites Vladimir Putin’s war machine. It also makes the immediate effects more harmful to the West than to Russia—rising oil prices are forcing the European Central Banks to raise rates even as the continent risks a war-induced recession.
Coupled with Russia’s control of Ukraine’s Black Sea exports, the global food shortage and inflation threaten to facture the alliance and exacerbate debt and migration crises across the developing world that could overwhelm both the EU and the United States.
The United States through NATO or another alliance of the willing should enter the Black Sea, clear the mines and provide naval escorts for Ukrainian grain, oil seed and other exports. That risks a military confrontation, but we have lots of options to make a direct conflict unattractive for Mr. Putin.
Confronting child expenses, gas and food prices, and Russia in the Ukraine head-on is much better than talking down to Americans about gender, race and profligate energy habits ordinary folks have too few means for altering.
All of this will require some personnel changes. The debacles in Afghanistan and the danger that Russia slices off a piece of Eastern Ukraine and some of its ports make changes at State and Defense prime candidates but at the White House, the president needs some moderate Republican advice.
Can you name three intelligent things the White House economics team has said about inflation?
OK can you name one? If you hand in a blank blue book, with the correct name, date and signature—this is not a Pennsylvania absentee ballot—the professor will give you an A.
White House advisors have carped long enough about monopolists that did not rain inflation on the nation when Mr. Trump was president, and such demagoguery is unworthy of tenure.
• Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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