The Politics of Joy
The Left, typically beset by anger and hostility over everything from protesting in support of terrorists in the mid-East to a perceived right to kill babies in the womb, is joyful these days. The near comatose Joe Biden has been replaced by energetic Kamala Harris turning what was shaping up as an electoral rout into a competitive presidential race. Despair turned to joy.
Joy, however, is neither a strategy nor a tactic – it is an emotion. And while emotions do indeed play a large role in political campaigns the emotion must be felt by a wide swath of the electorate, not just the activist base. To be sure Democrats are more adept at using emotion than Republicans who tend to focus more on policy. But joy without policy is like a house built without a foundation; at some point it will collapse.
Barack Obama successfully used emotion conveying his message as “hope and change.” Donald Trump followed up with his iconic “Make America Great Again” slogan. Perhaps the most successful use of emotion in relatively recent presidential history was that deployed by four-term President Franklin D. Roosevelt whose campaign theme song “Happy Days Are Here Again” became a Democrat Party staple for decades.
Unlike Kamala Harris’ vaguely defined “Opportunity Society,” Franklin Roosevelt’s happy talk had a foundation. Roosevelt took office amid the Great Depression and began building what is today the deep state by dramatically expanding federal programs to pull the nation out of the economic slump. There is vigorous debate over whether those programs helped to end, or extended the Great Depression. Eventually though the economy improved, the nation felt better and Roosevelt got the immediate credit.
The problem for Harris and her joyful minions is that she is part of the administration that has caused the rampant inflation, high interest rates, and housing crisis of the past three and a half years. To continue the analogy, she is more Herbert Hoover (Roosevelt’s predecessor who is blamed for the Great Depression) than Franklin Roosevelt.
The few solutions she has proposed are time-tested failures. Price controls in particular have been spectacular disasters every time and everywhere they have been tried. It sounds good to promise aspiring home-buyers $25,000. But, that will cost billions of dollars most likely financed by expanding the money supply – printing money – which will trigger another round of inflation.
In an effort to combat the over 20% inflation that has occurred during the Biden/Harris years the Federal Reserve has raised target interest rates. While not historically high, the current rates are higher than they have been in decades casting the intended cooling effect on the economy and contributing to voter concerns over their personal financial well-being.
Suspiciously, the Federal Reserve just weeks before the Presidential Election has now implemented the first interest rate cut since 2020. Government statistics show the inflation rate has dropped significantly, although the higher prices of the past few years remain in place. But, inflation and GDP numbers are subject to revision during the ensuing months so we don’t know if they are in fact accurate.
The unreliability of government data was laid bare several weeks ago when the rosy jobs growth numbers of the late spring and early summer were “revised” downward by over 800,000 jobs – an astoundingly high revision even by government data standards.
In an effort to “not be burdened by what has been,” the Left and its allies in the legacy news media will tout “an improving economy.” The interest rate cut will make for some joyful “news” reporting, but the reality is that it takes months for such actions to perk through the economy and have an impact that people will actually see in their daily lives.
Food prices have risen 25.8% since 2020. A cart of groceries that cost $100 in November 2020 today will cost you $125.80. The cost to heat your home has also risen dramatically. Natural gas prices have risen 27% since the winter of 2019-2020, electricity costs have surged over 18%. Periodic spikes in gasoline have also contributed to the strain on family budgets.
The bottom line is few voters sit around after dinner reading government statistical reports, but they know it cost them much more to put that dinner on the table. This is why virtually every poll taken over the past year has found inflation/the economy to be a top voter concern.
All the happy talk in the world cannot change what voters actually feel. The candidate who most effectively addresses those concerns will likely end up the winner of what is shaping up to be one of the most closely contested presidential elections in U.S. history.
(Lowman S. Henry is Chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute and host of the weekly American Radio Journal and Lincoln Radio Journal. His e-mail address is lhenry@lincolninstitute.org.)
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