When President Joe Biden was running for office, he liked to say, “I’ll do my job and take responsibility. I won’t blame others.”
If only that were true.
Ever since Biden moved into the White House, voters have been subjected to a nonstop stream of excuses and blame-shifting. It is truly amazing how nothing is ever this man’s fault. Perhaps nothing ever will be until he leaves office.
At first, Biden claimed that the surge of migrants illegally crossing the southern border would be temporary. Then, he blamed the weather — and eventually former President Donald Trump. In reality, Biden’s catch-and-release policies predictably caused the border crisis and continue to cause it to this day.
When Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal turned into a fiasco that killed 13 Americans, Biden first blamed Trump. Then, he blamed the Afghans themselves.
Biden even blamed the wind one time after he fell down the stairs of Air Force One.
Inflation, voters’ No. 1 concern, has been no different. Again, Biden first tried to say the problem was just “transitory” and would go away. Then, he blamed the supply chain — then meat monopolies and oil companies. Anybody but Biden was to blame.
But now, Biden has a new inflation boogeyman, and he thinks this one will stick. Of course, that is Russian President Vladimir Putin. It turns out that after voters from both parties told pollsters they supported banning the import of Russian oil, Democrats saw an opportunity to blame someone new.
“The good news is we now have a very specific reason for rising gas prices and a specific villain,” Biden campaign pollster Celinda Lake said this week. “Before, it was kind of ambiguous: What’s going on? Why are gas prices going up?” But with Putin, Democrats now have “a villain that we agree on and [whom] Republicans are divided on.”
This is how the #PutinPriceHike hashtag was born. Perhaps the only surprise here is that it took two weeks after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine for Democrats to think this up.
Never mind that gas prices had already risen 75% before Putin even invaded Ukraine. Never mind that inflation hit a 40-year high before the invasion. Never mind that Republican voters are just as supportive of banning Russian oil imports as Democrats are. All that matters is that now, whenever any voter complains about inflation, Biden will blame Putin because, hey, maybe that will get people off his back.
But the biggest driver of inflation in the United States is not Putin — it is Biden. He is the one who pushed a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, the largest peacetime deficit spending bill in history, when he first took office. All he had to do was implement Trump’s vaccine distribution plan and let the country reopen, and the economy would have recovered from the pandemic just fine. Instead, Biden, not Putin, sent hundreds of billions to millions of households, regardless of whether they were working or not. He gave hundreds of billions more to states, almost all of which already had budget surpluses.
The result, according to former President Barack Obama’s own top economic advisers: the rampant inflation we are seeing today. And this is not our opinion but that of Obama National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, Obama Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman, and Obama auto bailout czar Steve Rattner.
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Voters are smart enough to remember that inflation and gas prices were out of control long before Putin invaded Ukraine, and they will probably act accordingly this coming November. But in the Democrats’ defense, given that they are unlikely to reverse course and increase domestic fossil fuel production, blaming Putin is probably their best hope.