Biden Touts Himself as a Budget-Cutter

Plus, the need for “no labels” journalism

President Biden

President Biden, at an April 18 campaign event in Philadelphia, rolled out what was to me a new campaign claim: that he’s a budget-cutter. “guess what? We’ve cut the budget by a lot of money: $172 billion so far. So, don’t tell me it can’t be done,” Biden said, according to a White House transcript of the event.

Count me skeptical on that claim. It’s true that federal outlays in current dollars have declined, according to the latest Office of Management and Budget figures, to $6.1 trillion in 2023 from a pandemic-relief spending-binge peak of $6.8 trillion in 2021. But the non-Covid normal baseline was $4.4 trillion in 2019. And OMB estimates spending of $6.9 trillion in 2024. Outlays as a percent of GDP have gone from 20.9 percent in 2019 to an estimated 24.6 percent in 2024. What scant spending restraint exists has to do partly with Republicans in Congress resisting Biden’s own budget requests.

Simply setting a goal of getting federal spending back to pre-pandemic levels, either in dollars or as a percent of GDP, would be a big deal. Being the accountant-in-chief isn’t, as a rule, the most inspiring role for a presidential candidate; frequently, it’s a trap. But for Biden to go around depicting himself as a budget-cutter while presiding over the most expensive federal budget in dollar terms in American history is something that risks striking a lot of American voters as phony.

The White House transcript, as is frequently the case, also contains strikethroughs and brackets that record Biden’s trouble speaking, even from a teleprompter, at these sort of events.

It was even harder to believe just two months later, on June the 5th [6th].  I had just graduated from law school, earned an incredible — and learned about an incredible man, later that night, had been assassinated….

Are you ready to choose freedom over [and] democracy?  Because that’s America.  (Applause.)

The New York Times has an article about this event by Nicholas Nehemas and Michael Gold that mentions neither of the blunders nor the budget cut claim. That creates an opening for publications like this one to fill in the gaps and let readers in on news that the left-leaning press doesn’t think is news.

Vice President Harris on the re-election campaign challenge: Vice President Harris, at a campaign event at a private residence in Los Angeles on April 16, 2024, according to a White House transcript:

You know, my husband, Doug — he’s so very funny.  He’s like, “Honey, you know, the problem that we have in this reelect is that our list of accomplishments — like a CVS receipt.”  (Laughter.)  You know, the thing just goes on and on and on.  And we have to condense it and bring it, you know, down to maybe three or five things that people can process, but there’s so much. 

It is indeed “very funny” that anyone in the Biden-Harris inner circle thinks, even half-jokingly, that the big political problem they have going into the re-election campaign is that the administration has so many accomplishments that the big problem is paring down the list so that is short enough “that people can process.”

As far as I can tell, there’s been no coverage of the remark yet in the New York Times. That’s understandable somewhat for structural reasons—it was an evening event on the West Coast, involving the vice president, not the president, and their editorial antennae aren’t exactly finely tuned to material that makes the Democratic politicians look silly. It creates an opening for publications like this to fill in the gaps and let readers in on news that the left-leaning press doesn’t think is news.

The Ultras need an editor: “Ultra Conservative Mike Johnson Counts on Democrats for His Survival,” is the headline over a Bloomberg News story that was on the Bloomberg homepage this morning.

Maybe if you are an editor or reporter at Bloomberg in Washington or New York, Mike Johnson seems “Ultra Conservative,” but does Bloomberg have a stylebook explaining which politicians qualify for the “ultra” label and which are merely “conservative,” without “ultra” status?

Likewise, a New York Times editorial calling for Biden to consider pausing military aid to Israel refers to “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his ultranationalist allies in government.”

A search of the New York Times archives discloses frequent use of the term “ultraconservative” and only ultra-rare use of the term “ultraliberal.” That probably says more about the political perspective of New York Times editors and reporters and paying subscribers than it does about the relative prevalence of those views among newsmakers.

News organizations tend to defer to people who want to identify or describe themselves when it comes to gender and sexuality…a piece coming this weekend in the Times magazine about a “polycule” in Cambridge, Massachusetts has someone explaining, “there are self-identified males who identify as heteroflexible, heterosexual, bisexual.”

When it comes to political labels, however, frequently the “ultra” label isn’t something politicians choose as an identity for themselves, but rather a description that the journalists apply, even if the politicians do not themselves embrace it.

The late Joe Lieberman championed a “No Labels” political movement. Readers would in most cases be better served by “no labels” political journalism, or at least fewer, more carefully applied labels. Such an approach would be more cautious about slapping the “ultra” label on politicians. Anything else is ultra-irresponsible.

Thank you!: Here at The Editors, we are appreciate all our readers, and we are ultra-appreciative of those who pay. If you can spare the $8 a month and have not yet become a paying customer, it would make us ultra-grateful if you became one today. As President Biden would say, “choose freedom over [and] democracy.”