What is 'bidenomics' and why is it suddenly everywhere?

Speaking in downtown Chicago, President Biden permitted himself a conspicuously campaign-minded victory lap of sorts, telling attendees that he often encourages organized laborers he meets

to "brag a little bit more about what you do" — while delivering a speech calibrated to do exactly that on his own behalf. Insisting he was "not here to declare victory in the

economy," Biden nevertheless bragged that "we have a plan that is turning things around incredibly quickly." Repudiating the "trickle-down approach" of Ronald

Reagan's eponymous "Reaganomics" the president instead touted his own rhetorical iteration: "Bidenomics" — a phrase plastered on signs and banners that surrounded

Biden during his remarks. The White House has embraced Bidenomics, a term from which the president himself has distanced in the past ("I did not come up with the name" he claimed

Wednesday, adding that he was now "happy" to call it such). This embrace comes as a direct rebuttal to prevailing disapproval of Biden's economic policies; an Associated Press

poll from last month showed only 33% of the country backed the president's handling of the economy. Bidenomics is "the word of the day, word of the week, word of the month, word

of the year here at the White House," White House spokesperson Olivia Dalton said on Tuesday, ahead of Biden's Chicago speech. Between the president's remarks and the rest of

the administration's full-throated backing of the term, it's clear that "Bidenomics" is intended to play a central role in Biden's reelection pitch to voters. So

what is "Bidenomics" really, and where did it come from? SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE SIGN UP FOR THE WEEK'S FREE NEWSLETTERS From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. WHAT MAKES THE TERM SPECIFIC TO BIDEN? Bidenomics, as the White

House explained in a recent press release, is "an economic vision centered around three key pillars: Making smart public investments in America; Empowering and educating workers to grow

the middle class; and Promoting competition to lower costs and help entrepreneurs and small businesses thrive." The platform is an overt rejection of the Reagan-era policies that cut

taxes for the wealthy in the purported belief that the profits would simply "trickle down" to everyone else was a "failed approach led to a pullback of private investment from

key industries, like semiconductors to solar," Lael Brainard, director of the White House Economic Council, explained on Tuesday. Instead, Bidenomics is "an approach that grows

the economy from the middle out and the bottom up" with a particular focus on "growing the middle class," she added. In reality, Bidenomics is "a bit

all-encompassing" as a term — one which the White House is using to describe "a broad collection of policies aimed at using government muscle to revive and reshape the economy to

help the middle class," Politico explained. Noting that Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon, the two White House advisors who distributed the administration's triumphant Bidenomics memo

"are messaging experts and not economists," CNN said it's "a telling sign of the origins of 'Bidenomics' as partly a branding exercise." Still, there are

concrete policies the administration points to as part of the broader, if somewhat nebulous, Bidenomics effect; the bipartisan $1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill has lead to tens of

thousands of federally funded projects across the country, while maintaining a "strong domestic manufacturing base," the White House bragged; Biden also highlighted the "$500

million investment in the Good Jobs Challenge, which stems from the American Rescue Plan'' during a recent North Carolina visit, CNN pointed out, linking the initiative to the

Bidenomics' second pillar of empowering and educating workers; the administration is also focusing on its record of "expanding high speed internet access and cracking down on

industries that charge so-called junk fees," Politico said. WHY IS BIDEN EMBRACING IT NOW? For as much as the White House at large has embraced "Bidenomics" as a guiding

economic philosophy_ _Biden himself has been reticent to take ownership of the term, telling reporters on Wednesday that "you guys branded it. I didn't. I never called it

Bidenomics." "The twist — and the challenge — is that for much of his presidency, Bidenomics has been a pejorative," The Washington Post concurred, adding that the term

"has been used most frequently by conservative opinion writers" attacking the administration for inflation and exploding consumer prices. For instance, a 2022 Wall Street Journal

Editorial Board op-ed on "Bidenomics 101" lampooned the president, calling it "embarrassing for the leader of the free world to sound like he's channeling Hugo

Chávez," while insisting that Biden "doesn't appear to know anything" about economic policy. A year earlier, the conservative Washington Examiner ran an essay on the

"three pitfalls of Bidenomics," concluding that "if you like higher prices and long lines at the pump, more people on the government dole, skyrocketing inflation, and

trillions more added to the $28 trillion national debt, you are going to love four years of Bidenomics." With the caveat that "the question of how strongly to tout the economy has

vexed virtually every president running during a time of recovery," Politico said that the decision to co-opt "Bidenomics'' comes as the president "has pledged to

avoid the missteps of his former boss, Barack Obama" whose 2010 "recovery summer" push largely fizzled by late August. Conversely, the Biden administration seems to have

"learned a lesson" from the Obama White House's adoption of "Obamacare" — initially deployed as a conservative attack against the Affordable Care Act — in which

"Obama's advisers realized that they should not let the Republicans own and negatively define the term 'Obamacare,'" and instead began using the term "with

pride," Chicago Sun Times columnist Lynn Sweet wrote on the eve of Biden's Wednesday speech. As such, "Bidenomics" can in some sense be thought of as merely applying a

comprehensive label to the fact that "Biden has been talking about how to grow the middle class for his own half century in top-level politics," CNN's Stephen Collinson wrote.

WHERE DOES BIDENOMICS GO FROM HERE? Faced with grim polling that shows a majority of the country disapproves of his handling of the economy so far, Biden and his team are looking ahead to

the 2024 presidential election in the hopes that "new branding will provide a favorable contrast to the record of GOP frontrunner and former president Donald Trump, as well as a rebuke

to the trickle-down Reaganomics embraced more broadly across the Republican presidential field," Politico said. "Biden is selling his program hard because he knows its first test

will be political," agrees The Washington Posts' EJ Dionne. "The standing of Reaganomics was secured only after Reagan's reelection. The same will be true of the word

Biden first resisted and now holds high." Ultimately, Biden's electoral "Bidenomics'' pitch is a throwback to a traditional style of campaigning — perhaps no

surprise given its roots-in-and-similarities-to both Reaganomics and Obamacare. While so much of Biden's messaging has been focused on framing himself as an avatar of normalcy in

comparison to Donald Trump's agent of chaos, focusing on his economic achievements is "a conventional political approach against Trump," Collinson said. And should Trump not

win his party's presidential nomination, Biden's campaign "has even more of an imperative to change poor public perceptions of his handling of the economy." "I

don't know whether the angry white people in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are less angry if we get them 120,000 more manufacturing jobs," one senior Administration official told

The Atlantic's Ronald Brownstein this past January. "But," the official added, "we are going to run that experiment."