Liberal pundits, notably Jonathan Chait and Matthew Yglesias, call this phenomenon “the hack gap” — the notion that Democrats are politically cursed because their allies in academia and the think tank world are just too honest and outspoken about what they believe, as opposed to Republican analysts, who in this telling are either all too willing to say what politicians want to hear, or keep their true opinions to themselves.

The paradigmatic example is Larry Summers, who was a Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and also served as Harvard’s president. Summers has been an omnipresent thorn in Biden’s side, and he presciently warned last spring that inflation was coming when the president’s economists were still pooh-poohing that prediction.

But now, says Paul Begala, a longtime Democratic strategist who is close to the administration, it’s time for Biden to start whacking energy companies for allegedly gouging the American public at the pump. He has calculated that the federal government spends $14.9 billion each year to subsidize oil companies, compared with $14.2 billion on school lunches for needy children.

In Begala’s estimation, a contrast like that ought to be a political winner for Biden. “You know, a hungry third-grader never charged me $5 a gallon for gas,” he quipped.