WHEN 46 STARTS TO EQUAL 41 — It won’t be long before “George Herbert Walker Biden” creeps into the vernacular, given the parallels surfacing between the 41st president and the 46th. Like the first President Bush, President Joe Biden is viewed by much of Washington as fundamentally decent — good at democracy and foreign policy but bamboozled by an economy that, apart from inflation, he keeps suggesting is fine. People didn’t feel that way in 1992, and despite job growth and low unemployment, they certainly don’t now. The price for Bush was a second term. Looking back 20 years, Time suggested that the echoes “should worry Joe Biden.” But there’s also something Biden could learn from Bush’s experience — either for his own reelection prospects, or for posterity. In 1991, Dave Carney, a Republican strategist then working for Bush, was watching the news on TV when H.W. was asked, during a golf outing, about a 120-point drop in the stock market — the kind of development that tends to put people on edge. “No reason at all to get concerned,” Bush said at the time. “The fundamentals are all right.” In his office, Carney knew the answer was a disaster. “It was totally true, but it was a blunder in terms of communicating to the public that was worried about the economy, and it just gave the opening for [Bill Clinton strategist James] Carville to talk about, ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ and all that shit,” Carney said. Today, he said, “This is what Biden is doing, too.” Jobs? Great, “except people are lining up for baby formula they can’t get or lining up for gas.” “It doesn’t matter what the economists think,” Carney said. “People are worried about their pocketbook and their cash, and I think that is a similarity. … Biden is doing the exact same thing. He’s relying on the economic eggheads to tell him everything is going to be fine, without showing any empathy or any ability to tell them things suck.” Biden, for the most part, does not suffer from the Kennebunkport caricature of an out-of-touch politician that afflicted Bush. Yes, Biden is still trying to sell an economy that he insists is “on the move.” But he also called inflation his “top domestic priority” this week. He told union workers in Chicago, “I understand.” But neither Bush nor Biden “are what you would call great communicators,” Carney said. And no matter who the president is, “anytime the economy has trouble, anything the incumbent says sounds clueless.” Biden is not a one-term president yet. Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama recovered from weak economies and weak public approval ratings to win second terms. And in the political environment now — in our hyper-partisan, post-Donald Trump era — any comparison to previous presidencies is fraught. “The easy parallel is ‘Effective on the global stage, not so effective at home,” said Jon Meacham, the Bush biographer and presidential historian who occasionally advises Biden. “I get the trope. But I just don’t know. These are two good men trying their best in incredibly difficult circumstances. And President Biden is having to govern in a climate of destructive distrust. President Bush was dealing with the beginnings of contemporary right-wing populism, not that populism’s full fruition, which is what we’re experiencing now. Nobody stormed the Capitol in the early 1990s.” Still, there may be one line to draw from Bush to Biden, in Meacham’s view. Having studied Bush, he’d expected that “the moment Covid became a non-existential threat, too few people would give Biden credit for fixing it, or for stabilizing the economy from its pandemic uncertainty.” “That’s a 41 thing,” Meacham said. “Forty-one wins a war, brilliantly manages the end of the Soviet Union, reunifies Germany, and he watched his numbers steadily decline. That’s in part because 20 minutes later, not enough people cared. … The political marketplace rarely gives you long-term credit for things done, or terrible things prevented from being done. Politics is a future-oriented business.” So Bush, to Meacham, is an example of the longer arc by which presidencies are judged. By the time of his death, in 2018, his image and historical reputation had improved. “He was buried and hailed a statesman of the republic and a defender of democracy and of decency,” Meacham said. “I once asked him, late in his life, what he made of all the praise that was coming his way.” Bush told him, “It’s kinder and gentler all over the place.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. As your recycling bin becomes weighted down with political literature, a request from some of our colleagues: Send us photos of campaign ads you receive in the mail. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at dsiders@politico.com, on Twitter at @davidsiders.
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