The Economist: Joe Biden is practising some Clintonian politics

 Joe Biden is practising some Clintonian politics

President Joe Biden says he is in a battle for the soul of America. He is out to save democracy at home from Donald Trump and abroad from Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China. Mr Biden also wants to restore America’s manufacturing, rebuild its infrastructure, bring peace to the Middle East and confront climate change. And yet none of that seems to mean quite as much to most Americans as when he starts railing about finding fewer potato chips in a bag than he used to.

Mr Biden and his aides are putting new emphasis on his efforts to fight what he calls junk fees and shrinkflation—the underhanded means, in his view, by which businesses surprise consumers with higher prices or less stuff, such as potato chips, than they expect. Unlike almost anything else Mr Biden says or does, combating such costs draws overwhelming bipartisan support.

And so, among other measures not obviously destined to save the soul, Mr Biden has proposed regulations to force universities to refund unused meal-plan payments; to force airlines to disclose fees for checking baggage; to cap fees for late credit-card payments; to ban fees for stopping cable-television service early; and to eliminate charges for such bogus services as oil changes on electric cars. In total, the White House says, such measures would save Americans $20bn each year.

Mr Biden has seized on some of his most high-profile appearances to complain about the size of candy bars or sports-drink bottles. “What makes me the most angry”, he declared in a video the White House released on the day of the Super Bowl, “is that ice-cream cartons have actually shrunk in size but not in price.” Some members of Congress laughed in March when Mr Biden brought up the potato-chip gap in his state-of-the union address, right between a pledge to protect Social Security and a summons to tighten border security. But in a recent survey commissioned by Blueprint, an initiative to back Democrats, that tested 40 issues that could affect the 2024 election, banning businesses from charging misleading fees ranked first, with net support of 76%. Mr Biden has endorsed legislation to empower the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys-general to take action against companies that shrink product sizes without cutting prices.

Mr Biden’s micro interventions hearken back to another era for the Democratic Party, when it was less sweeping in its ambitions for systemic change and also more attentive to the daily travails of most Americans. Bill Clinton got some big things done as president, but he also practised a kind of assiduous concierge politics that flipped John F. Kennedy’s message in order to inquire, obsequiously: what can your country do for you? The help he offered included more-efficient emergency telephone numbers, a computer chip to let parents censor their children’s television-watching and a campaign to reduce truancy.

The man who did the inquiring for Mr Clinton was Mark Penn, a pollster who joined Mr Clinton’s re-election campaign as it was flailing in 1995. Mr Penn imported to politics lessons he learned pushing products and building brand loyalty for the likes of AT&T. Critics who denigrated his work as corporatist and small-bore overlooked the respectfulness embedded in his approach: Mr Penn believed voters were smart and sophisticated about their own interests, that they cared about issues and the nuances of policy more than about personality or vision. In fact, issues could define personality by communicating to voters that a leader cared about them and was on their side. By welding issues to values, such as by protecting children from scary or sexual television programmes, the right policies would create powerful political levers.

Mr Penn’s approach worked. In 1996 President Clinton counted on the polarising Republican speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, to motivate the Democratic base, and he relied on the sorts of policy ideas generated by Mr Penn to reach swing voters. A similar combination sustained Mr Clinton through the sex scandal of his second term, enabling him not merely to weather impeachment but to leave office with an approval rating of 66%, higher than any president since Harry Truman, when Gallup began tracking this number, and higher than any president since.

Clintonian pragmatism, with its swing-voter sensitivities, is out of favour in today’s more ideological Democratic Party. But Mr Biden has found a loophole: pointillist policies attacking junk fees also appeal to leftist voters because, in Mr Biden’s telling, the villains are big businesses. Complaining about such charges lets Mr Biden shift responsibility for inflation and sound more populist without annoying any core Democratic constituency.

Bill Clinton v Donald Trump

But Mr Biden is not offering the range of services that Mr Clinton did. It is hard to imagine Mr Clinton paying as little attention to such parental anxieties as learning-loss from covid and absenteeism. Mr Biden has instead focused on issues of particular concern to his college-educated base, such as forgiving student debt. This has resulted in questionable policy and politics: the Harvard Youth Poll recently showed that even Americans between 18 and 29 care far less about student debt than they do about inflation, immigration and crime. Now Mr Biden is under pressure from left-wing staff and supporters not to take executive action on illegal immigration and to declare a climate emergency.

When it comes to assuring swing voters that he is on their side, Mr Biden is not the agile communicator Mr Clinton was. And while, as Mr Clinton did, Mr Biden can count on a Republican opponent to motivate his own base voters, Mr Trump also presents a novel challenge to Mr Penn’s theory of politics: he is a blustering, protean, attention-sucking affront to the conviction that issues really do matter more, in the end, than personality. ■

The Economist, May 2nd 2024