On his inauguration day in January 2021, President Joe Biden inherited a bad economy. More accurately, he inherited a lot of bad things, mainly due to the then-dire pandemic and all its reverberating, devastating impacts. From hamstrung supply chains to slowed business growth to vast unemployment to civil unrest, it was as difficult an entry point as any president could expect to navigate—and Biden got right to work providing relief.
As he signed those orders, the economy “was in a downward spiral,” recalled Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary for the first half of President Biden’s first term—and a current MSNBC host. “There were a range of impacts, including the supply-chain slowdown, and the fact that so many businesses, small and large, across the country were shut down,” she told Fortune in a recent interview.
Addressing each of those dire impacts can necessarily mean more time working around the clock, and less time crafting a compelling, outward-facing narrative. "When you're sitting in the government, your job is not just to communicate about the moment, it’s to act,” Psaki said.
In other words, the Biden administration put more emphasis on the action.
‘Pulling yourself out of a ditch’
But even if Biden’s team hadn’t been bogged down trying to turn around a battered economy post-COVID, those communications probably wouldn’t have landed anyway.
A hard lesson of the presidency: Even if you're making things better for working people day-in, day-out; delivering on each of your campaign promises; and then making new ones—and delivering on those—many people will nonetheless remain unimpressed.
That's because the commander-in-chief doesn’t get credit for making things slightly, gradually less bad, Psaki said.
“You're trying to communicate that you’re pulling yourself out of a ditch,” Psaki said. “I know this because I worked for Barack Obama when he was trying to communicate about pulling the country out of a recession.” (Psaki was Obama’s deputy communications director in the first years of his first team.)
“While [Obama’s] circumstances were different, it was a similar challenge, and you're trying to communicate to people: ‘I know we're losing 300,000 jobs a month, but a month ago, we were losing 600,000 jobs a month. So we're moving in the right direction. It's just we're not there quite yet.’”
The president—and indeed the press secretary—doesn’t “get credit for making things less bad, and in the moment, that can't be what your bar is, because your job is to make things less bad, not to get credit for it, necessarily.”
Nonetheless, Psaki disputes the notion that “everybody feels like [the economy] is bad,” Psaki said. “Actually, the economic numbers, not just the data, but the approval, has improved for the Harris campaign on the economy and for the administration. In part, it's because you can't tell people how they should feel.”
Inflation is getting better, she said, but it “takes a moment” for people to feel better: “That's the challenge of communicating around economic data.”
But it’s not all bad, Psaki says
Biden’s term will be well remembered for some of its strongest moments, of which there are many, Psaki said.
“I think history will judge Biden’s administration as having some of the most progressive and impactful economic policies in decades, given what he did on infrastructure and what he did on climate,” she said, adding that Biden’s landmark $490 million investment in clean energy and climate action—part of the Inflation Reduction Act—is “the most ambitious climate bill that has ever been done.”
Today, thanks to Biden’s leadership, the U.S. is in the pole position. Its economy is in much better shape than that of any European country. There’s been a huge amount of funding for the transition to renewables. The labor market showed stronger-than-expected gains last month.
Any president would wish for that kind of coverage going into an election; the Democrats are hoping Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden’s successor, can take it and run with it.
