President Joe Biden’s public statement Tuesday morning announcing a U.S. cutoff of Russian oil was an excellent example of how words matter when they come out of presidential mouths — and how multiple audiences complicate the presidency.
The most important audience Biden had to address was Russian President Vladimir Putin. Biden’s goal before and after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 has been to impress on Putin how seriously the U.S. and its allies take Putin’s aggression and how severe the consequences will be — without doing anything that counts as entering the war. Everything that Biden says about this, including the fact that he says it himself (rather than, say, issuing a press release), begins with making that position as clear as possible.
Biden’s next audience is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Biden’s policy requires Zelenskyy and the Ukranians to keep fighting. That’s delicate because Biden can’t give them the kind of unqualified assistance that they want and that a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would expect to receive.
And then there are NATO allies, other friendly nations, and, well, every other world leader, all of whom pay attention to what U.S. presidents say. In part that’s because Biden is trying to keep intact a broad coalition opposing Putin. In part it’s about Biden’s general reputation for foreign policy expertise. At any rate, Biden’s statement has to avoid angering those he can’t afford to anger. It’s not just about state actors, either; private companies and non-government actors will take their cues from what the president says.
Only after all of that can Biden worry about audiences at home — interest groups, business firms that may be affected by the handling of the war, and voters. To be sure, Tuesday’s speech, scheduled for late morning, almost certainly wasn’t aimed at directly at voters. But that doesn’t mean that Americans won’t hear sound bites from it, so it’s important to avoid saying anything that could show up in a future attack ad.
I’ve been arguing that Biden’s interest as far as electoral politics is concerned is to play down the Russia-Ukraine situation. Unfortunately for that goal, his foreign policy required him to play up the conflict before the invasion began. Then the State of the Union speech happened to fall last week, just after the war began, giving Biden no choice but to emphasize the conflict, which had the bonus advantage of giving him (or perhaps the Ukrainians, but he was the one standing there) several bipartisan ovations.
Still, Biden’s primary message for voters remains reassuring them that the U.S. is not at war and will not go to war. At this point, Biden isn’t asking citizens to do anything other than to tolerate the mainly economic costs of a sanctions policy he believes is best for the nation.
That gets us to skyrocketing gasoline prices. While Biden did provide Democratic politicians and operatives with a talking point: that it was “Putin’s price hike,” a point he repeated in brief remarks to the press later in the day. Biden did, as he said, “level with the American people” about the costs (or at least some of the costs) they will have to bear. Doing so is part of the president’s representational responsibilities.
But the speech was in no sense one to rally citizens to sacrifice for a cause. Biden began with details of his sanctions policies, not with any argument about why any of it is necessary; he treated that as a something that was, at least at this point, self-evident. All of this is consistent with playing down the situation as best he can.
It’s also consistent with the idea that any electoral effects of high gas prices will have a lot more to do with outcomes than with winning the spin war over it. Note that while pump prices did hit a new record in nominal dollars, inflation-adjusted prices are far from record territory, and energy as a percentage of consumer spending is still well below record levels. Republican hypocrisy on this topic has been getting a lot of attention recently, with Republicans accused of pushing for the cutoff of Russian oil that Biden announced on Tuesday and then bashing him for the inevitable result.
It’s probably correct that neither Republican hype nor White House spin will change the basic fact that people don’t like it when gas prices go up. But it’s also generally true that voters care about the direction of economic change more than they care about levels, so if prices are headed down by fall it will probably blunt most electoral effects. Beyond that? Sure, it’s worth it to try to brand inflation as Putin’s fault, but it’s unlikely that voters will care whose fault it is. If they’re unhappy, they’ll take it out on the incumbent president and his party.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
