As the midterm elections near, President Biden has increasingly made exaggerations or misstatements about his influence on the U.S. economy and his policy record.....
As President Biden has told it in recent months, America has the fastest-growing economy in the world, his student debt forgiveness program passed Congress by a vote or two, and Social Security benefits became more generous thanks to his leadership.
None of that was accurate.
The president, who has long been seen as embellishing the truth, has recently overstated his influence on the economy, or omitted key facts. This week, Mr. Biden praised himself for giving retirees a raise during a speech in Florida.
“On my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks,” he declared. The problem: That increase was the result of an automatic cost-of-living increase prompted by the most rapid inflation in 40 years. Mr. Biden had not done anything to make retirees’ checks bigger — it was just a byproduct of the soaring inflation that the president has vowed to combat.
In stops across the country in recent weeks, Mr. Biden has also credited himself with bringing down the federal budget deficit — the gap between what America owes and what it earns.
“This year the deficit, under our leadership, is falling by $1.4 trillion,” he said last week in Syracuse, N.Y. “Ladies and gentlemen, the largest ever one-year cut in American history on the deficit.”
Left unsaid was the fact that the deficit was so high in the first place because of pandemic relief spending, including a $1.9 trillion economic aid package the president pushed through Congress in 2021 and which was not renewed. Mr. Biden was in effect claiming credit for not passing another round of emergency assistance.
White House officials contend that robust tax receipts, which helped reduce the deficit, are largely the result of strong economic growth that was supported by Mr. Biden’s economic policies.
President Biden, who appeared with Gov. Kathy Hochul at an event in Syracuse, N.Y., last month, has agreed to campaign with her on Sunday.
President Biden will campaign with Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York on Sunday, making a last-minute midterm swing to try to save his party’s candidate amid a swell of Republican support in one of the nation’s most liberal states.
Mr. Biden will attend a rally in Yonkers in Westchester County with Ms. Hochul, Senator Chuck Schumer and other Democrats to try to boost what has been lackluster enthusiasm among the party’s base in early voting.
Ms. Hochul’s campaign confirmed the event, which was first reported by Capitol Pressroom.
The 11th-hour intervention by Mr. Biden, and other prominent Democratic surrogates, is more typical for a swing state than New York, but it underscores just how close the race has become in its closing days.
Ms. Hochul appears to be holding onto a narrow lead over Representative Lee Zeldin, a four-term Republican from Long Island. Yet Mr. Zeldin has made meaningful inroads across the state in the race’s closing weeks, and there are signs that Republican enthusiasm is surging, making it one of the closest contests for governor that New York has seen in two decades.
Mr. Biden, whose approval rating in recent polls appears to be about even to slightly above water in New York, will be the centerpiece of a concerted star-studded push by Ms. Hochul to turn out her base. The governor is scheduled to campaign on Saturday with former President Bill Clinton in Brooklyn, home to the state’s largest Democratic voting block.
On Thursday, she appeared with Hillary Clinton, the former New York senator and Democratic nominee for president, and Vice President Kamala Harris, at an event in Manhattan. Former President Barack Obama also cut a radio ad for Ms. Hochul, but is not expected to appear on the campaign trail in New York.
Mr. Zeldin has brought in big-name Republican surrogates of his own in recent days, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Glenn Younkin of Virginia. On Saturday, he was expected to appear with Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who recently left her party.
One high-profile supporter of Mr. Zeldin has been noticeably absent: former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump helped the Republican candidate raise money earlier this fall, but he has not appeared on the campaign trail in his home state, where he remains deeply unpopular.
It is common for presidents to spin economic numbers to improve their pitch to voters. Like many of his predecessors, Mr. Biden has emphasized economic indicators that are favorable to his record, including a low unemployment rate and the record pace of job growth in his first two years in office — a focus intended to win over an American public that remains deeply pessimistic about the economy, according to opinion polls.
But as it gets closer to midterm elections that will determine the fate of the rest of Mr. Biden’s legislative agenda, the president’s cheerleading has increasingly grown to include exaggerations or misstatements about the economy and his policy record.
White House officials have sometimes been forced to awkwardly correct Mr. Biden’s claims. Other times, they have doubled down on them.
Senior administration officials acknowledged that the president and other administration officials have unintentionally misspoken about the economy on occasion but denied that Mr. Biden or his administration had ever attempted to mislead the public about the economy. They said that his record requires no overstating.
“The president’s economic agenda has given us an economy with historic job creation, faster declines in unemployment than prior recoveries, and private sector investments in new industries throughout the country,” Abdullah Hasan, a White House spokesman, said. “Where on occasion we have misspoken, as any human is allowed once in a while, we have acknowledged and corrected or clarified such honest mistakes.”
Mr. Biden’s economic exaggerations generally pale in comparison to the tales spun by his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump. The former president, whose lies included insisting that he did not lose the 2020 election and that the Capitol was not attacked by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, regularly boasted of “the greatest economy in the history of the world” — a statement not based on any facts. Mr. Trump also said his giant tax cut package paid for itself when it did not, and he relied on outlandish economic growth projections to make his budgets balance.
NYT