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**OCTOBER 24, 2022**

Kuttner on TAP

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**** Democrats Finally Start Talking About the
Economy

It's about time-and one has to hope, just in time.

For weeks, the

**Prospect** has been warning that Democrats will lose the midterm if
they don't start talking about Republican threats to people's
economic well-being. Stan Greenberg
<[link removed]>
has weighed in with compelling evidence and strategic insights; I've
written about the need for Democrats to talk about inflation
<[link removed]>;
and most recently Greenberg, Patrick Gaspard, Mike Lux, and Celinda Lake
<[link removed]> authored a joint
Memo to Democrats that ran on the

**Prospect** site and was broadly circulated.

The conventional wisdom was that since issues like inflation apparently
play to Republican advantage, better to change the subject-to abortion
or to Republican theft of democracy. Sorry, but that doesn't work. By
all means, keep talking about Republican threats to women's health and
personal liberty, but don't think that substitutes for a potent
economic message.

Over the weekend, these urgent arguments finally broke through. Speaking
on CBS's

**Face the Nation**
<[link removed]>,
Nancy Pelosi declared:

The Republicans have said that if they win, they want to subject
Medicare, Social Security-health blackmail-to lifting the debt
ceiling ... They have said that they would like to make it a
discretionary spending that Congress could decide to do it or not,
rather than mandatory. So Social Security and Medicare are on the line.

 
She also said this:

The fight is not about inflation. It's about the cost of living. And
if you look at what we have done, to bring down the cost of prescription
drugs, to bring down the cost of energy and the rest in our legislation,
you will see that that has been opposed every step of the way by the
Republicans, and they have no plan for lowering the cost of living or
helping with inflation.

This is tricky stuff, as Greenberg keeps emphasizing. Even though
Democrats have much to brag about-jobs created, recession avoided,
concrete benefits to citizens-unalloyed bragging is the wrong message
when most people are feeling lousy about their own economic condition.
The right message is the Republican threat to worsen things, and the
gains we can make with a Democratic Congress.

Our president still doesn't get this quite right. Biden has
accomplished a lot and can't resist talking about it. He led a recent
speech with deficit reduction, a Beltway issue that most voters care
don't about. But he is starting to extend the argument to the
Republican threats. In that October 21 speech
<[link removed]>,
Biden also said:

If [Republicans] get their way, the power we just gave Medicare to begin
to negotiate lower prescriptions drugs goes away. Gone.

If they get their way, the $2,000 cap on prescription drug costs, which
takes effect next year-maximum any senior would have to pay, no matter
what their drug costs are, would be $2,000. It goes away. Gone.

The $35-a-month cap on insulin, which takes effect next year for folks
on Medicare-gone.

Maybe we'll finally get Democratic unity around smart messaging. If
you haven't yet read the Gaspard/Greenberg/Lake/Lux piece
<[link removed]>, you should read it
and pass it along. Nancy Pelosi evidently did.

Is it too late for this message to shift the dynamics of the race? Some
pundits think the election is already locked, but a lot can happen in
two weeks.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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Why Meta's Virtual Worlds Are Failing
<[link removed]>
Maybe Mark Zuckerberg just doesn't have that understanding of what
people want anymore. BY RAMENDA CYRUS

President Biden's Lonely Foreign Policy
<[link removed]>
His changes are highly welcome, if not perfect. Yet they will be easy to
reverse. BY RYAN COOPER

The Unlikely Origins of the Chamber-Chopra War
<[link removed]>
Big business could soon get their chance to kill the CFPB for good,
thanks in part to former Obama aide William Daley. BY VISHAL SHANKAR

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