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      Democrats need to admit that inflation is real – or voters will turn on them | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      Democrats need to admit that inflation is real – or voters will turn on themAndrew GawthorpeInflation is an issue of real concern to many Americans. It’s also a chance for Democrats to name and shame price-gougers Inflation is rapidly becoming a problem for the Democratic party and President Joe Biden. They need to get a grip on it before it imperils their wider agenda and sinks their chances of keeping control of Congress in the midterm elections next year. As they think about how to address it, one thing is certain: what they’ve been doing so far isn’t working. A recent poll found that two-thirds of Americans disapprove of how Biden is handling inflation, and the same number consider the issue “very important” in their evaluations of his presidency. Among those Americans concerned about the state of the economy, nearly nine in 10 ranked inflation as a reason why. Clearly something has to change.But inflation, a complicated product of economics and mass psychology, is also devilishly difficult to understand, and even more difficult to control. Presidents have few tools to tame it, and the ones they do have can backfire. The inflation of the 1970s crippled Gerald Ford’s presidency and was doing the same to Jimmy Carter until he opted for an extreme cure – installing a chair of the Federal Reserve who dramatically raised interest rates, stopping inflation but also plunging the economy into a deep recession which handed the White House to Ronald Reagan. These experiences left inflation with a reputation as a presidency-killer, with either the disease itself or the medicine taken to combat it ultimately killing the patient.Despite this, Democratic party elites have been slow to take the latest round of inflation as seriously as they should. American policymakers have not had to deal with levels of inflation as high as this for 30 years, and it shows. Many latched on to the message that inflation was “transitory”, a temporary consequence of the economy revving back into high gear as the country emerged from the coronavirus pandemic. Some liberals have even lashed out at those warning about rising prices, characterizing their concerns as an attempt to undermine support for Democrats’ plans to spend more to advance social welfare and combat climate change.Whatever the economic merits of the argument – and many economists still expect inflation to start falling soon – this response has been politically toxic. Democrats risk appearing out of touch on an issue of profound concern to many Americans. In order to change tack, they need to communicate to voters that they feel their pain and that they’re fighting to make things better.There are already signs that Democrats from the president on down are starting to get it. Biden recently gave a speech on the topic and announced the release of 50m barrels of oil from the US strategic petroleum reserve, an attempt to bring down gas prices at the pump. He also pointed the finger at oil companies for charging consumers high prices even as the wholesale price of oil has dropped over the past few weeks.But Democrats should also be doing more to point the finger at the businesses who are helping to foment the problem. The Wall Street Journal reports that companies in many different sectors are using this inflationary spike as a cover to raise prices faster than their costs, essentially betting that consumers won’t object when they already see prices rising all around them. According to the report, nearly two out of three big, publicly traded US companies have seen larger profit margins this year than in the same period in 2019. Inflation might be hurting consumers, but it’s a boom year for corporate America.Democrats ought to use all the tools of government to highlight and combat these abuses. As Biden has been finding out, public anger over inflation tends to be directed towards the incumbent president – and the only way to survive might be to redirect it at a more appropriate target. The presidential bully pulpit can be used to highlight corporate abuses and regulatory investigations, such as the one already announced by the FTC into the oil and gas sector, can hold industries to account and combat potentially illegal practices. Nor should Democrats stop there. They control both houses of Congress and should consider holding congressional hearings to name and shame particularly egregious price-gougers.Whether any of these measures will actually serve to lower prices is an open question. But the only responsible thing to do is try. Corporate price rises risk kicking off an inflationary spiral in which the initial reasons for rising prices become secondary to a general feeding frenzy, and anything that can be done to discourage it is healthy. Administration actions might also serve to dampen consumers’ expectations of future inflation, which will reduce the risk of a spiral. Because the media narrative is driven by inflation that has already happened, reassurance remains important even after prices have begun to stabilize.But even if we shouldn’t hold our breath for these actions to actually slow the rate of price increases, it’s important to show leadership on this issue for the simple reason that it’s what worried voters want and deserve. To be seen to be acting and pointing a finger at those to blame is smart politics, especially if this bout of inflation does indeed prove to be transitory and prices begin to fall next year.Meanwhile, corporate America has to decide if it really wants to undermine the Democrats and risk handing stewardship of the economy back to the party of Donald Trump. With the modern Republican party increasingly the party of incompetence and ignorance, self-restraint might be the better option. As Democrats should seek to remind the price-gougers, profiting less now will help everyone mightily down the road.
      Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University, and host of the podcast America Explained
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      Joe Lieberman on Biden, Trump and centrism: ‘It’s a strategy for making democracy work’

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      Joe Lieberman on Biden, Trump and centrism: ‘It’s a strategy for making democracy work’The Democratic ex-senator preaches a deeply unfashionable gospel of compromise in a country paralysed by civil war A friend once joked to Joe Lieberman, former senator and vice-presidential nominee, that the Democratic party was like his appendix: it was there but not doing much for him.“It’s a funny line,” he says by phone from his law office in New York, “but the truth is that it’s more than that because I feel good physically when the Democrats do well – in my terms – and I do get pain when they go off and do things that I don’t agree with.”Lieberman may be in for a world of pain now. The other Joe – also 79, also a Democratic ex-senator – was expected to share his centrist convictions as US president. Instead Joe Biden as president has surprised friends and foes alike with the scale, scope and audacity of his multi-trillion-dollar agenda.The Democratic party itself has moved left over the past decade, making it an increasingly awkward fit for Lieberman, who voted for George W Bush’s Iraq war, endorsed Republican John McCain over Barack Obama for president and is still close friends with South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, the quintessential Republican apologist for Donald Trump.So it was that in a recent appearance on C-Span to promote his new book, The Centrist Solution, Lieberman was assailed by a caller from Oregon over his “archaic” views and policies that “have done nothing for the poor and the working class”. Another, from Connecticut, upbraided him for the prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the deregulation of Wall Street and a crime bill that “put so many Black and Brown people in this country in jail”.Yet he remains unbowed and undeterred by political currents. Lieberman, co-chair of No Labels, a group focused on bipartisanship, continues to preach a deeply unfashionable gospel of compromise working across the aisle in a country that seems paralysed by a cold civil war.When he joined the Senate in 1989, he recalls, a typical vote would see around 40 conservatives on one side, 40 liberal on the other, and 20 that were an unpredictable mix. By the time he left in 2013, there was no Democrat with a more conservative voting record than any Republican, and no Republican with a more liberal voting record than any Democrat.He attributes the polarisation to the gerrymandering of congressional districts, which makes incumbents risk averse, the increasing influence of money in politics – “they expect you to do ideologically what they want you to do” – and the partisanship of both cable news and social media, which encourages politicians to play to their echo chambers.Lieberman recounts from his Senate experience: “We would want to be able to go home at election time and say, ‘My friends, here’s what I got done for us’. But now people tend to want to go home and say, ‘Oh, here’s what I tried to do except for those bastards in the other party’. That’s a really vicious cycle that takes the country nowhere. The public, certainly the broad middle, is sick of all this.”This disaffection, Lieberman believes, helps explain why, in 2016, millions of Americans decided to blow it all up by electing an outsider, celebrity businessman Trump. Evidently it did not work as Washington became more poisonous and polarised than ever.Does the “centre ground” mean anything any more when one party, the Republicans, has veered into far right extremism, for example by embracing Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election and failing to condemn the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol?Lieberman’s answer will strike some as out of touch and trafficking in false equivalence: “The divisive forces in both of our two major parties have moved further away from the centre. But I believe those more extreme segments of both parties are in the minority in both parties.”“The majority, I’d say, in the Republican party is centre right and in the Democratic party is centre left, and it’s quite possible for them to make their way to the centre and negotiate and come up with centrist solutions. In the book, I’ve tried very hard to distinguish centrism from moderation. Centrism is not an ideology. It’s a strategy for making democracy work.”He continues: “It takes leaders who are willing to work together across party lines to get something done and, if that doesn’t work, it takes voters who I think are in the majority, certainly the plurality, to demand at election time that the candidates they vote for will work across party lines.”To many bruised by years of Washington gridlock, this will sound naive.Lieberman’s support for the 60-vote filibuster, a Senate procedural rule, as one of the last remaining incentives to bipartisanship is out of touch with a new generation of progressives who regard filibuster reform as essential to protecting voting rights and democracy itself.But he does allow the possibility that the two-system party might no longer be fit for purpose – and that the long awaited, much derided case for a viable third party might become irresistible.“If one could imagine the Republicans nominating Donald Trump again the president and the Democrats – assuming for a moment that Joe Biden doesn’t run again – nominate somebody further to the left, which is possible as a result of Democratic primaries, wow, there’s going to be a big space in the middle open and somebody will take it,” he says.“The conditions now are unprecedented in American history. The degree of partisanship and the degree of effective control of the political system by minorities to the right and left in both parties really may open the door to a successful third party campaign for president, perhaps as early as 2024.”Lieberman has reason to be a student of third party candidacies. In 2000 Ralph Nader’s Green Party polled at less than 3% but was widely blamed for depriving Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore and running mate Lieberman of critical votes in their narrow defeat by Bush and Dick Cheney.The losing vice-presidential candidate himself, however, is philosophical: “I never blamed Nader because he had the legal right to do what he did and there was some interesting post-election polling that surprisingly indicated that the Nader vote would have divided between Bush and Gore.”He describes the supreme court’s ruling in favor of Bush in the disputed election as a “miscarriage of justice”, however. A Gore-Lieberman administration is now one of the great historical what-ifs, an alternate timeline that could have shaped the 21st century very differently.For example, Lieberman points out, Bush oversaw a big and unnecessary tax cut that put America back in deficit territory after three surpluses in a row under Bill Clinton. “I’m confident that President Gore would have felt a responsibility to go into Afghanistan, from which we were attacked [on 11 September 2001], but would he have gone into Iraq? I doubt it. That would have changed history a lot.”“The other major change would have been obviously that Al Gore was the leading American champion for doing something about climate change. We would have pushed through some reactions to climate change which would have put us in a better, safer situation now.”Criticized for his resistance to withdrawing from Iraq, Lieberman lost a Democratic primary election for his seat in Connecticut in 2006 only to win election as an independent. Two years later, he again marched to the beat of his own drum by endorsing his old friend McCain, a Republican senator for Arizona, rather than Democratic senator Obama, the first African American nominee of a major party.He insists: “Surprisingly, neither Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, both of whom I really knew well, ever asked me for my support. McCain did and I thought, what the hell? He’s my friend, totally capable of being president, and so I don’t regret at all supporting him.”“We had great areas of agreement on foreign and defense policy but we disagreed a lot. I consider myself a centre left Democrat. He’s a conservative Republican but a maverick so he broke on climate change, he broke for a while on campaign finance reform.”It later emerged that McCain had wanted Lieberman as his running mate, believing the country ready for a bipartisan ticket, only to be persuaded by his staff to go for the inexperienced, rabble rousing Sarah Palin instead. Another crossroads of history. McCain later admitted it had been a mistake.Lieberman, the nearly man for a second time, comments: “If McCain had been able to have me as his running mate, I have confidence that we would have done better than he did with Governor Palin. But it’s hard to say that we would have won. Obama was just walking on the mountaintop at that point and Bush 43 was unpopular and the economy was in bad shape, so people really wanted a change.“And not only was Obama a change in party but he was African American. It was a breakthrough moment for America. I think a lot of people voting for him felt not only that he was the change and capable but that we were going to prove again what we are as a country. So it was an extraordinary moment.”The close friendship between Lieberman, McCain, who died in 2018, and another senator, Graham of South Carolina, saw them dubbed “the three Amigos”. But where McCain evidently loathed Trump, Graham has defended the former president’s indefensible actions while enjoying his hospitality on the golf course. Does Lieberman ever call him and say, snap out of it?“Well, we talk a lot. Lindsey will always try, by his nature, to be where he feels he can be effective and so you’ve watched him sometimes be quite close to Trump and at other times be critical. We remain friends. I have nothing negative to say about him because he is my friend but I do think that his great skill ultimately – and I watched it while I was in the Senate – is to be a bridge builder, a bipartisan centrist problem solver.“At the right moment he will be, I hope, part of the sort of restoration of the Republican party in which he grew up and where his really dear friend – and mine, of course – John McCain was ultimately the nominee. That’s the Republican party Lindsey most naturally fits into.”It is a party that can still be saved, Lieberman insists. “I don’t think Trump is going to win in 2024 and Republicans who are not tied to him will see that increasingly and people will challenge him, including some who will go back to the regular conservative Republican party, not the party that was so extreme and nasty and willing to ignore the law of the United States.“I don’t know who it will be. A lot of people are looking at taking him on. It will take some guts. There’s something brewing out there. So, am I optimistic that the more mainstream centrist elements in the Republican party will take over again? I am.”For their part, Republicans have condemned Biden for campaigning as a centrist but governing as what they perceive as a radical who pushed a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, $1.2tn infrastructure deal and $1.75tn social and climate spending package.Lieberman, who worked with him in the Senate for 24 years, says: “The squad, the further left in the Democratic party, seems to be having influence that is taking him, at least in public perception, further to the left than I certainly thought he was and I’m confident he is now.“It may be understandable because we’ve just come through an unprecedented crisis because of the pandemic and he wanted to do everything he could to get us back on track. So the bills he supported were bigger than any I ever voted for or that he voted for in the 24 years. But I think we we saw him at his natural best on the bipartisan infrastructure reform bill that just passed and he signed.”Ever hopeful, Lieberman notes that the president defied progressives by nominating Jerome Powell for a second term as chair of the Federal Reserve. He adds: “Biden is solid. He sees the world realistically and he knows he can’t be Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson now in part because he doesn’t have the great Democratic majorities that they had.“And the country, thank God, is not where it was in the Depression, as bad as the pandemic was. The old Joe, which is the real Joe, will be dominant in the next three years of his presidency.”TopicsUS newsThe US politics sketchUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsUS SenateanalysisReuse this content More

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      ‘Corporate’ Senate Democrats imperil the Build Back Better plan, says Tlaib

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      ‘Corporate’ Senate Democrats imperil the Build Back Better plan, says TlaibHouse progressive warns such Democrats are influenced by donors who ‘don’t have the best interests of the American people in mind’ “Corporate” Democrats in the Senate imperil Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act, a leading House progressive warned – but not just Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the targets of most leftwing ire.Such Democrats, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan said, are influenced by donors who “don’t have the best interests of the American people in mind”.Republicans’ vilification of Trump critics is ‘ruining’ the US, says governorRead moreAt the same time, the New York Times reported that Manchin and Sinema are increasingly receiving money from corporate and conservative donors.The president’s domestic spending package is worth $1.75tn and seeks to increase spending on social programs and healthcare and to combat the climate crisis.After months of negotiation, and after Biden signed into law a $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure bill, the House of Representatives passed Build Back Better on Friday.There was no Republican support and there will be none in the Senate. That gives Manchin of West Virginia and Sinema of Arizona huge influence, in a chamber split 50-50 and controlled by the vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris.The two senators have already pressured the Democrats to cut the cost of the spending plan in half.Tlaib is one of the first Muslim women in Congress, representing the third-poorest congressional district.In an interview broadcast on Sunday, she told Axios she was “fearful” that “corporate Dems” would “guide this agenda. It’s gonna be the people that are gonna continue to profit off of human suffering.“I know that they’ve been influenced and guided by folks that don’t have the best interests of the American people in mind.”Tlaib said she was referring to Manchin and Sinema, “but I think there are some others that … have issues with the prescription drug negotiations there.“And so I can’t say it’s just those two. They seem to be leading the fight, but I wouldn’t be surprised if folks are hiding behind them.”Manchin has spoken regularly, mostly painting the spending plan as too expensive. Sinema is less vocal but on Friday she gave an interview to ABC15, an Arizona station.Saying she was “a workhorse, not a show horse”, she said she welcomed progressive criticism.“I appreciate the first amendment,” she said. “So I appreciate when folks are willing to tell me they agree with me or disagree with me. If they want to protest, if they want to offer things, all of that is welcome.“So I guess my message to folks would be keep telling me what you think. I appreciate it. And I’m going to keep doing the work and delivering results for Arizonans.”Sinema said she would not “bend to political pressure from any party or any group”.In terms of financial pressure, the New York Times reported on Sunday that Manchin and Sinema were attracting support from “conservative-leaning donors and business executives”.Kenneth Langone, a Wall Street billionaire, usually gives to Republicans but has praised Manchin and promised to fundraise for him.Langone told the Times: “My political contributions have always been in support of candidates who are willing to stand tall on principle, even when that means defying their own party or the press.”Stanley Hubbard, a billonaire Republican donor who has given to Sinema, said: “Those are two good people – Manchin and Sinema – and I think we need more of those in the Democratic party.”TopicsRashida TlaibDemocratsUS SenateUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Joe Biden reportedly telling allies he will run for president again in 2024

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      Joe Biden reportedly telling allies he will run for president again in 2024President shared his decision ‘with a small group of donors’ during a virtual fundraiser, reports the Washington Post Joe Biden has reportedly been letting allies know he’ll be running for president again in 2024.Amid sliding approval ratings, Biden is reported to be keen to dash any assumption in Democratic circles that he’ll be standing down after a single term and opening the field to hopefuls including Vice-President Kamala Harris.Democrats worry inflation could imperil agenda and congressional majoritiesRead more“The only thing I’ve heard him say is he’s planning on running again. And I’m glad he is,” the Democratic former Connecticut senator Chris Dodd told the Washington Post in an article published Saturday – Biden’s 79th birthday.According to the newspaper, Biden shared his decision “with a small group of donors” during a virtual fundraiser earlier this month.Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor who attended the event, said there was “no difference” in what Biden told the donors to what he stated at a White House press conference in March. Then, Biden attempted to dampen speculation by stating that he had “never been able to plan three and a half, four years ahead.”Rendell told the Post: “What he is saying publicly is what he firmly believes. He will not run if he feels he can’t do the job physically or emotionally.”Biden was already the oldest presidential candidate to be elected as commander in chief when he beat Donald Trump in the November 2020 election, and will be 15 days short of his 82nd birthday on 5 November 2024, the next time voters in the US will be asked to choose their president.In 2019, at a campaign event in New Hampshire, Biden said it was “totally appropriate” for voters to consider his age.“Just like when I was 29 [when he was elected a US senator], was I old enough? And now, am I fit enough? I’ll completely disclose everything about my health. I’m in good shape,” Biden told the rally, according to the Laconia Daily Sun.On Friday, doctors declared Biden “fit to successfully execute the duties of the president” after his first physical in office.Trump, who has yet to declare if he will be running again, has frequently taunted Biden over his age and perceived health challenges. The former president, whose own weight places him in the obese category, would be 78 on election day 2024.TopicsJoe BidenUS elections 2024DemocratsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Democrats worry inflation could imperil agenda and congressional majorities

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      Democrats worry inflation could imperil agenda and congressional majoritiesRepublicans blame Biden’s spending packages but supporters argue Build Back Better will help Americans pay their bills As recently as this summer, Joe Biden seemed to be taking a “keep calm and carry on” approach when it came to concerns about rising inflation.“As our economy has come roaring back, we’ve seen some price increases,” the US president said in July. “Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen were expected and expected to be temporary.”But now, with inflation hitting a 30-year high last month, Biden’s tone has become noticeably less upbeat.“Everything from a gallon of gas to a loaf of bread costs more,” Biden said in Baltimore earlier this month. “We still face challenges, and we have to tackle them. We have to tackle them head on.”Americans are taking notice of high prices with growing alarm, and their concerns appear to be negatively affecting Biden’s approval rating, which had already been falling in recent months. As the US experiences sticker shock at the gas pump and in grocery stores, Democrats are worried that inflation could imperil their legislative agenda and their majorities in Congress as crucial midterm elections loom next year.While the president and fellow Democrats had previously sought to downplay rising inflation, it has become an unavoidable issue as prices continue to climb. The labor department has reported that prices increased by 6.2% over the past 12 months, marking the most rapid uptick since 1990. Gasoline prices have increased by 49.6% over the past year, while food prices have risen by 5.3%.As prices rise, more working Americans are noticing their bills have become more burdensome. According to a poll conducted by the progressive firm Navigator Research this month, 54% of Americans now say the cost of groceries and gas is a “major crisis”, marking a 17-point increase since September.Republicans have blamed the price increases on Biden’s economic policies, arguing that rising inflation underscores the need to oust Democratic lawmakers in the midterm elections next year.“As Biden and Democrats continue to push for trillions more in reckless spending and higher taxes, skyrocketing prices and a broken supply chain under Biden are crushing American families, workers and small businesses,” said Emma Vaughn, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. “Americans will soundly reject Biden’s failed economic agenda at the ballot box in 2022.”There are some early signs that Republicans’ message is striking a chord with voters, as the party looks to take back control of Congress in 2022.An AP VoteCast survey showed that 35% of Virginia voters named the economy and jobs as the most important issue facing the state, making it the most common response. Those voters were more likely to support the Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe by two points in the election held earlier this month.And it’s not just Republicans who are sounding the alarm about price hikes. Senator Joe Manchin, one of the key holdouts in Democrats’ negotiations over their $1.75tn spending package, has said he is hearing more from constituents who are concerned about their gas and grocery bills.“By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse,” Manchin said in response to the labor department’s latest report. “From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.”Manchin has previously expressed concern that Democrats’ spending package, known as the Build Back Better Act, could negatively contribute to inflation. In a September op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Manchin warned against approving more government spending, saying, “An overheating economy has imposed a costly ‘inflation tax’ on every middle- and working-class American.”The Biden administration has sought to mitigate inflation-related concerns about the bill, which passed the House on Friday. The president has repeatedly touted a letter from 17 Nobel laureates in economics, which argued the spending package would “ease longer-term inflationary pressures”.But the bill’s critics say the legislation would not address the inflation happening now and may even cause prices to rise further, urging members of Congress not to approve another large spending package.“We’re not worried about the long-term. We have inflation in the here and now, and this policy will make it worse in the foreseeable future,” said Curtis Dubay, a senior economist at the US Chamber of Commerce, a pro-business lobbying group that opposes the spending package.“The first rule of being in a hole is to stop digging,” Dubay added. “This would keep digging. So they need to not pass it.”Jason Furman, who served as the chair of the White House council of economic advisers under Barack Obama, rejected that argument. “Build Back Better will have a negligible impact on inflation over the medium term,” Furman said. “In gross terms, the total spending is one-tenth as much per year as what we just did this year [with the coronavirus relief package]. Moreover, that spending is paid for.”For progressives, conservatives’ warnings about inflation seem a convenient excuse to quash a bill that they already opposed.Natalia Salgado, the director of federal affairs for the progressive Working Families party, said the legislation would actually help average Americans deal with rising inflation by lowering their healthcare and childcare costs.For example, the Build Back Better Act would establish universal prekindergarten for all three- and four-year-old children. It would also reduce Affordable Care Act premiums and lower drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies.“If we really want to have a discussion about inflation, let’s talk about the many things that this bill is going to help minimize the cost of,” Salgado said. “Folks coming out of this pandemic were already hurting economically. It is economically imperative to pass the Build Back Better legislation.”Democrats in Congress have echoed that message, urging those who are worried about inflation to support the bill.“House Democrats’ infrastructure deal and Build Back Better Act tackle inflation head on through their historic investments,” said Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Rather than working to solve economic problems, Republicans have voted overwhelmingly to block these bills that reduce prices for the American people and focused instead on their own extremist agenda.”But many of the provisions of the Build Back Better bill will not go into effect immediately. The Medicare drug price negotiations will not begin until 2025, and the universal prekindergarten program will be built up over the next few years.In the short term, it may be difficult for Biden to address rising prices. Even if the Federal Reserve moves quickly to stifle inflation, it would take months for Americans to feel the effect of the fiscal policy change. And when it comes to gas prices specifically, Biden has little sway over the global oil market, although he has called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate “mounting evidence of anti-consumer behavior by oil and gas companies”.“Politically, people are very sensitive to inflation in gasoline prices and food because that’s just a visible item they see,” Furman said. “I’ve been in government when gas prices are going up, and it’s terrible. Everyone hates you.”On the plus side for Democrats, the frequent fluctuations in gas and food prices mean those costs could decrease over the next year even if overall inflation continues to rise, Furman said.That possibility may be Democrats’ best hope for maintaining control of Congress after the 2022 elections. However, if prices do not improve over the coming year, the president’s party may need to brace for an ugly election night next November.TopicsUS economyInflationDemocratsUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More