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      Biden Targets a New Economic Villain: Shrinkflation

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      Liberals prodded the president for years to blame big corporations for price increases. He is finally doing so, in the grocery aisle.On Super Bowl Sunday, the White House released a short video in which a smiling President Biden, sitting next to a table stocked with chips, cookies and sports drinks, slammed companies for reducing the package size and portions of popular foods without an accompanying reduction in price.“I’ve had enough of what they call shrinkflation,” Mr. Biden declared.The video lit up social media and delighted a consumer advocate named Edgar Dworsky, who has studied “shrinkflation” trends for more than a decade. He has twice briefed Mr. Biden’s economic aides, first in early 2023 and again a few days before the video aired. The first briefing seemed to lead nowhere. The second clearly informed Mr. Biden’s new favorite economic argument — that companies have used a rapid run-up in prices to pad their pockets by keeping those prices high while giving consumers less.The products arrayed in the president’s video, like Oreos and Wheat Thins, were all examples of the shrinkflation that Mr. Dworsky had documented on his Consumer World website.While inflation is moderating, shoppers remain furious over the high price of groceries. Mr. Biden, who has seen his approval ratings suffer amid rising prices, has found a blame-shifting message he loves in the midst of his re-election campaign: skewering companies for shrinking the size of candy bars, ice cream cartons and other food items, while raising prices or holding them steady, even as the companies’ profit margins remain high.The president has begun accusing companies of “ripping off” Americans with those tactics and is considering new executive actions to crack down on the practice, administration officials and other allies say, though they will not specify the steps he might take. He is also likely to criticize shrinkflation during his State of the Union address next week.Mr. Biden could also embrace new legislation seeking to empower the Federal Trade Commission to more aggressively investigate and punish corporate price gouging, including in grocery stories.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Spending Impasse Persists Amid G.O.P. Resistance as Partial Shutdown Looms

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      With Republicans insisting on adding right-wing policy measures to spending bills, lawmakers are running out of time to strike a deal to avert a partial government shutdown before a deadline of Friday at midnight.Congressional leaders have failed to reach a deal on legislation to keep federal funding going past Friday, with Republicans insisting on adding right-wing policy dictates to the spending bills, pushing the government to the brink of a partial shutdown within days.Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said on Sunday that despite “intense discussions” that were continuing among top lawmakers to break the impasse, Republican recalcitrance was raising the prospect of a “disruptive shutdown” at midnight on Friday.“While we had hoped to have legislation ready this weekend that would give ample time for members to review the text, it is clear now that House Republicans need more time to sort themselves out,” Mr. Schumer said in a letter to Democratic senators. “With the uncertainty of how the House will pass the appropriations bills and avoid a shutdown this week, I ask all senators to keep their schedules flexible, so we can work to ensure a pointless and harmful lapse in funding doesn’t occur.”With no sign of a breakthrough, President Biden summoned congressional leaders to the White House on Tuesday to discuss the spending legislation, as well as the $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel that the Senate passed earlier this month, which Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to take up.But the more immediate task was to keep government spending from lapsing this week.Three consecutive times over the last six months, Congress has relied on short-term, stopgap spending bills passed by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers to keep government spending flowing, essentially punting on a longer-term agreement for several weeks at a time. Each time, the Republican speaker — first Kevin McCarthy, then Mr. Johnson — has promised hard-right lawmakers that they would try to win more spending cuts and conservative policy conditions on how federal money could be spent during the next round of negotiations.Now, with patience wearing thin among ultraconservatives, pressure is mounting on Mr. Johnson, whose members want him to secure major cuts and policy changes that have no chance of enactment with Democrats in control of the Senate and White House. Lawmakers in the House, which has been out of session for the past week, are set to return to Washington on Wednesday, just two days before a deadline on Friday to fund military construction, agriculture, transportation and housing programs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The 2024 Election May Be Decided By Nonvoters. If They Vote.

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      “I wish God gave green noses to undecided voters, because between now and election eve, I’d work only the green noses,” Matt Reese, one of America’s first full-time political consultants, liked to say.Listen to this article, read by Natalia CastellanosOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Decades after Reese helped John F. Kennedy win the 1960 Democratic primary, consultants no longer need to wish for divine intervention. Microtargeting — the kind of selective persuasion efforts that Reese dreamed of — has become a fixture of 21st-century campaigns. Field operatives now target swing voters house by house, carrying computer tablets loaded with polling, registration and market-research data. And everyone understands that in close presidential elections, a few thousand votes in one state or another may decide the winner.But as Americans grow more polarized in their political identities, the number of swing voters diminishes. So a different kind of inconsistent voter grows more important: one who vacillates not so much between parties or candidates but between voting and not voting. Let’s call them the “ambivalent voters.” They’re the ones who often believe that showing up at the polls just isn’t worth the hassle.Elections, historically, are decided not only by those who cast votes but also by those who don’t. President George W. Bush edged out Al Gore in the 2000 election by 537 ballots in Florida. Yet there’s a case to be made that the five million Floridians who were eligible to vote in that election but did not were the ones who really tipped the balance. And nearly half of Americans regularly join the opt-out club. According to the University of Florida Election Lab, 44 percent of citizens who were eligible to vote in 2020 did not. The political scientists Lyn Ragsdale and Jerrold G. Rusk of Rice University have calculated that from 1920 to 2012, the slice of voters who sat out presidential contests averaged 42 percent. But in any given election, those who stay home or tune out may change: Fully 25 percent of the ballots in 2020 were cast by people who didn’t vote in 2016. A “nonvoter” can transform into a voter at any time — and if most of them break in the same direction, their decision to participate can be decisive.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Quiet Way Democrats Hope to Expand Their Power at the State Level

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      The Democratic Governors Association is beginning a multimillion-dollar effort aimed at appointing more state judges.Locked out of power on the Supreme Court and still playing catch-up against Republicans in the federal judiciary, Democrats are hoping to gain a political advantage on a less visible but still important playing field: the state courts.After flipping the Arizona governor’s seat from Republican to Democratic last year, Gov. Katie Hobbs has appointed 15 judges to the state’s Superior Courts. In five years leading deeply red Kansas, the Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, has named two justices to the Court of Appeals and one to the State Supreme Court.Governors have the power to appoint judges in nearly every state. These responsibilities are set to take center stage in political campaigns this year, as the Democratic Governors Association begins a multimillion-dollar effort, called the Power to Appoint Fund, aimed at key governor’s races.The fund, with a $5 million goal, will focus especially hard on two open seats in 2024 battlegrounds: New Hampshire, where the governor has the power to appoint state court justices, and North Carolina, which elects its justices; the next governor will appoint at least one State Supreme Court justice because of the state’s age limit rules.“Before we had our own abortion amendment issue here in the state of Kansas, I honestly didn’t hear much about court appointments except from attorney groups,” Governor Kelly said in an interview. “But since the Dobbs decision and then our own decision here in the state of Kansas, it’s become more of a forefront issue with folks. People, I think, recognize now more than ever the impact that the courts can have on their daily lives.”Pointing to the rightward tilt of the Supreme Court and important statewide court battles, Meghan Meehan-Draper, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, said that voters needed to be reminded of the power “Democratic governors have to appoint judges who are going to uphold the rule of law.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      To Save San Francisco, a Democrat Wants to Scrap Environmental Reviews

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      State Senator Scott Wiener hopes to spur redevelopment in the struggling downtown core by eliminating a major environmental hurdle.Not long ago, it would have sounded preposterous: A San Francisco Democrat asking to peel back California’s treasured environmental protections in the heart of the city.It would have been like painting the Golden Gate Bridge gray or cheering on the Los Angeles Dodgers. It just would not have flown.But as California grows more desperate for housing and San Francisco struggles to revive its city core, State Senator Scott Wiener says one thing must go: environmental review.Mr. Wiener on Friday will propose one of the broadest rollbacks of the once-vaunted California Environmental Quality Act by asking the state legislature to allow most projects in downtown San Francisco to bypass the law for the next decade.Empty buildings could more easily be demolished to build theaters, museums or college campuses, Mr. Wiener said. Office towers could more readily be converted to a wide variety of housing. The withering mall on Market Street could more quickly become something else — like the soccer stadium that Mayor London Breed has envisioned.“We know we need to make downtown viable,” Ms. Breed, a sponsor of the bill, said. “We can’t let process get in the way.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Steps Up, Helping Biden Just When the President Needs Him

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      Donald J. Trump’s stunning statement supporting a Russian attack against “delinquent” NATO allies takes attention away from unwelcome questions about the president’s age and provides the Biden camp a useful contrast.If anyone gets a thank-you note from President Biden for helping get him out of a jam in recent days, it should probably be former President Donald J. Trump.Just when Mr. Biden was swamped by unwelcome questions about his age, his predecessor and challenger stepped in, rescuing him with an ill-timed diatribe vowing to “encourage” Russia to attack NATO allies that do not spend enough on their militaries.The stunner from Mr. Trump over the weekend not only drew attention away from the president’s memory problems, as detailed in a special counsel report, but also provided a convenient way for Mr. Biden’s defenders to reframe the issue: Yes, they could now say, the incumbent may be an old man who sometimes forgets things, but his challenger is both aging and dangerously reckless.It was not the first time, nor likely will it be the last, that Mr. Trump has stepped up when an adversary was in trouble to provide an escape route with an ill-considered howler of his own. Mr. Trump’s lifelong appetite for attention has often collided with his evident best interest. For Mr. Biden, that may be the key to this year’s campaign, banking on his opponent’s inability to stay silent at critical moments and hoping that he keeps reminding voters why they rejected him in 2020.“There’s a saying that the enemy of your enemy is your friend,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who worked on the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who lost the party nomination that year to Mr. Trump. “Since Trump is his own worst enemy, he’s arguably Biden’s best friend.”That does not mean that age is no longer a political liability for Mr. Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest president in American history and would be 86 at the end of a second term. While Mr. Trump is close behind him at 77, the special counsel’s characterization of the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” proved searing and damaging.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden’s Age Is a Campaign Problem, Not a Governing One

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      Last fall I found myself at a dinner party that included a former Biden administration official and a Democratic donor, and the conversation turned, naturally, to President Biden’s age and his prospects for re-election. The ex-official said that from inside the White House, where people experience the policymaking process firsthand, Biden was overwhelmingly seen as an effective leader who should run again. The donor, on the other hand, saw Biden mostly at the fund-raisers where watching the president’s meandering speeches left him terrified about the upcoming campaign. The gulf in their perceptions, I think, speaks to the fact that Biden’s age has impaired his ability to campaign much more than his ability to govern, which has created an impossible dilemma for the Democratic Party.I have argued since 2022 that Biden shouldn’t run again because he’s too old, but there’s never been much sign that his advanced age affects his performance in office. I’m not aware of any leaks from the White House suggesting that Biden is confused, exhausted or forgetful when setting priorities or making decisions. It’s not just Democratic partisans who find Biden more impressive up close than his frail, halting image in the media would suggest. As Politico reported of the ousted House speaker Kevin McCarthy, “On a particularly sensitive matter, McCarthy mocked Biden’s age and mental acuity in public, while privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations.” There are obviously things Biden does that I disagree with; I wish he’d take a much harder line with Israel over civilian casualties in Gaza. But while his reluctance to publicly criticize Israel might stem from an anachronistic view of the country — Biden likes to talk about the Labor Zionist prime minister Golda Meir, who left office 50 years ago — his position is a mainstream one in the Democratic Party and can’t be attributed to senescence.Because Biden has delivered on many Democratic priorities, there was never any real push within the party to get him to step aside, forfeiting the advantages of incumbency in favor of a potentially bruising primary contest. But it’s obvious to most people watching the president from afar that he looks fragile and diminished and that his well-known propensity for gaffes has gotten worse. Poll after poll shows that voters are very concerned about his age. That’s why the special counsel Robert Hur’s gratuitous swipes at Biden as someone who might seem to a jury like a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” have caused an epic freakout among Democrats. His words brought to the surface deep, terrifying doubts about Biden’s ability to do the one part of his job that matters above all others, which is beating Donald Trump.That’s true even though the report by Hur, a former Trump appointee tapped by Merrick Garland to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents, looks like a partisan hit job. (Democratic attorneys general have a terrible habit of appointing Republican special counsels in an effort to display their own impartiality — a type of moral preening that Republican administrations rarely fall victim to.) Since Hur decided not to charge Biden with any crimes, his comments about Biden’s age, particularly his claim that Biden couldn’t remember the year his son Beau died, seemed designed to shiv him politically. If so, it worked.Some Democrats are now comparing the media fixation on Biden’s age to the saturation coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails eight years ago, and there are similarities. Betty Friedan wrote that “housewifery expands to fill the time available,” and the same is true of bad political news. Trump’s scandals are so multifarious that each one tends to get short shrift, while his opponents’ weaknesses and missteps can be examined at length precisely because there are fewer of them. This asymmetry worked to Trump’s advantage in 2016, and it’s helping him now.But there’s also a crucial difference between Clinton’s emails and Biden’s years. Clinton’s vulnerability was never really about her insufficient care with information security protocols. Instead, the emails became a symbol of a powerful but inchoate sense, magnified by disproportionate press attention, that she was devious and deceptive. Biden’s age is a much more straightforward issue; people think he’s too old because of how he looks and sounds. Pretending it’s not a problem isn’t going to make voters worry about it less; it’s just going to make them feel they’re being lied to.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yes, Biden’s Age Matters

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      One of the most difficult conversations you can have in life is with a parent or peer who is becoming too old and infirm to work. Whether the infirmity is physical or mental, often your loved one is the last person to realize his own deficiencies, so he may interpret respectful, genuine concern as a personal attack.This conversation is difficult enough when it’s conducted entirely in private with friends and family. It’s infinitely more difficult when it plays out in public and involves the president of the United States.The top-line conclusion of the special counsel Robert Hur’s report regarding the discovery of classified information at Joe Biden’s home is good for the president. It found, in no uncertain terms, that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.” It said prosecution would be inappropriate “even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.” The report even did the president the favor of clearly and unequivocally distinguishing his treatment of classified materials from Donald Trump’s vastly worse misconduct in his own retention-of-documents case.But the report presented what may be a worse assessment for Biden than the matter of guilt, which is its description of one reason he won’t be prosecuted: The special counsel found that Biden lacked the requisite degree of criminal willfulness in part because of his fading memory. The report characterized him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and said he had “diminished faculties in advancing age.” To bolster this assertion, the report provided some damaging details, including claims that Biden couldn’t remember the dates when he was vice president and couldn’t remember “even within several years” when his son Beau died.The report understandably angered Biden, but in a fiery news conference after the report was released, he confused the president of Egypt with the president of Mexico. In isolation, the gaffe was minor — less serious, for instance, than Donald Trump recently confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi — but the timing was terrible. The mistake, coming on the heels of two incidents in recent days in which Biden confused French and German leaders with their deceased predecessors, only served to bolster the special counsel’s conclusions.Democratic partisans may be furious that the special counsel was so blunt about Biden’s memory. But willfulness and intent are necessary elements of the underlying crimes, so Hur had to explore Biden’s mental state, and include illustrative details.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More