Opinion | Biden is Trying to Co-opt Trumps Biggest Strength

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In May, Jake Sullivan, Bidens national security adviser (and a key aide, before that, to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), made this point bluntly in a speech at the Brookings Institution. Sullivan criticized the belief that the type of growth does not matter. That has led, he said, to administrations that let Wall Street thrive while important sectors, such as semiconductors and infrastructure, disappear. He rejects the assumption at the heart of all these policies: that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently.

And he offered a little mea culpa for his own party. In truth, our domestic economic policies have also failed to fully address the consequences of our international economic policies, he said. By allowing globalization and automation to stifle domestic manufacturing, Democrats have become part of a Washington consensus that has eroded the socioeconomic foundations upon which any strong and stable democracy rests.

Bidens speech in Chicago tried to show that he is a Democrat who has learned these lessons. First, there is his emphasis on place. I believe that every American who is willing to work hard should be able to say where they grew up and stay where they grew up, he said. That’s bidenomics. After a while, he said again. I believe that every American who is willing to work hard should be able to get a job wherever they are in the middle, in the small towns, in every part of this country to raise their children on a good salary and keep their roots where they grew up.

I spoke with Jared Bernstein, the chairman of the Bidens Council of Economic Advisers, about thinking here. One of the somewhat lost assumptions of traditional economics is that you don’t have to worry about location because, as long as there are good jobs somewhere, people will go there and take them, Bernstein told me. . It doesn’t really work that way. One reason it doesn’t work that way is housing costs. The idea that you can move from rural America, where housing is cheap, to expensive housing in America, even with pay differences, is a bit of a fantasy, he said.

Bidens answer is built around the investments made by the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. You don’t put wind and solar farms in Manhattan and San Francisco. You don’t even have to do it in blue states, much to the chagrin of Democratic governors. Biden pointed to Weirton, W.Va., where a steel mill closed at the turn of the century and, because of him, an iron-air battery plant is being built on the same exact site, bringing back 750 jobs with good salary, restoration of pride and hope for the future. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy research firm, estimates that Biden’s red states will get $623 billion in clean energy investments by 2030, compared to $354 billion for blue states.

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