I’m not one to give advice to Joe Biden, but I’m going to give him some now: your chief of staff, Ron Klain… he needs to go, like, yesterday.
On Wednesday, America got inflation news we haven’t had in 41 years. The consumer price index hit 9.1% in June—a jump of 1.3 percent from a month prior. Experts predicted it would be 8.8%, so clearly, things are even worse than expected.
However, the White House wants us to believe things aren’t so bad. Joe Biden had the nerve to claim that the report is “out-of-date” because things have actually gotten better since June, and we should all be grateful for his leadership.
“Energy alone comprised nearly half of the monthly increase in inflation. Today’s data does not reflect the full impact of nearly 30 days of decreases in gas prices.”
While it’s true that gas prices have gone down 40 cents a gallon since mid-June, it’s hard to see how Joe Biden can call this some sort of victory when the national average gas price is $4.631 per gallon, still nearly double what it was when Biden took office.
But then again, his chief of staff is Ron Klain, so it actually makes sense. I highly suspect that Klain will be one of the first casualties in the Biden administration after the midterms, but frankly, why wait? My PJ Media colleague and friend Stephen Green often calls Klain The Real President™, and he’s probably right. I don’t envy Klain for being the man behind the curtain for Biden, but it’s clear that what he’s doing right now isn’t doing him any favors, and getting rid of him now would be a favor to us all.
Biden’s poll numbers have been underwater for nearly a year. So it seemed likely that once the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan left the front pages, Biden’s approval ratings would recover, but they didn’t.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the White House has been the constant denial that the various crises plaguing the nation for the past year and a half have been happening. Border crisis? There’s no border crisis. Inflation? It’s transitory; it’s a good thing….
With every issue that has confronted the Biden administration, Klain’s attitude seems to be to pretend things are going swimmingly, and as long as you say things are going well, the people will believe you.
For example, in December, he retweeted an op-ed by Paul Krugman that insisted 2021 wasn’t “all bad.” You can tell people all you want that things aren’t as bad as they seem and point to some random metric that makes things sound better, but people know how much more they’re spending to fill up their gas tanks or to buy groceries to feed their families. Rhetoric doesn’t trump reality.
And the reality is that the White House was blindsided by inflation. Biden’s Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, admitted this weeks ago. “Well, look, I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take. As I mentioned, there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy that have boosted energy and food prices and supply bottlenecks that have affected our economy badly that I didn’t — at the time didn’t fully understand,” Yellen told CNN. “But we recognize that now.”
This is what happens when an administration cares more about optics than solving problems. While those of us on the right saw what was coming, the White House, under the leadership of Ronald Klain, was telling us inflation would be transitory, and Ron Klain himself assured us that inflation would be down to 2.1% this year.
There are going to be transitory impacts of restarting an economy that was shut down.
But a key point in the Fed forecast today: inflation projected down to 2.1% in 2022. https://t.co/CvREtIdXxR
— Ronald Klain (@WHCOS) June 16, 2021
Well, he was only off by seven points, right? What’s a lousy seven points, right? Well, to morons running the country, probably not much. But to the millions of average Americans struggling to make ends meet, it’s enormous.
The Biden administration needs to change course—not for Biden’s sake but for the nation’s. For months now, the media has scrutinized Klain’s job performance, and his departure might give the administration the shake-up it needs. Of course, I don’t expect anyone in the Biden administration to be competent enough to solve the nation’s problems. Replacing Klain as chief of staff certainly won’t solve the plethora of problems plaguing the Biden administration, but it would be a start.