There may be no more vivid example of the bewilderment with which America’s rank-and-file journalists tend to process quotidian American politics than the complaint that voters seem more interested in our unfolding economic catastrophe than they do in following the machinations of the January 6 committee.
At CNN, Stephen Collinson notes that “polls repeatedly show that voters see the economy – a far more visceral issue in daily life than the threat to American democracy – as their top concern.” He’s right: voters do “see” the economy this way. And they are rational to do so, too, given that inflation is causing havoc in the United States, in a way that Donald Trump — who is not on the ballot in 2022 — is not. On the one hand, we have a “committee” that has “transfixed Washington”; on the other, we have “a nation still struggling to shake off the deprivations of a once-in-a-century pandemic and coping with raging inflation and growing fears of a recession.” Which of these did Collinson expect to dominate our political conversations nearly two years after January 6?
That is a rhetorical question. It’s also a question that President Biden and his party would do well to ask themselves in earnest. For nearly two years now, the Democrats and the press have treated inflation as if it were a mere distraction — to be managed with words instead of actions, so that political room could be created to do other things. But that is not how politics works.
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