We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Joshinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts into the premium version of
our website as well. Today we are joined by the one and only Kim
really Strassle. She's, of course, a member of the Wall Street Journal
Editorial Board and the author of the new book, The Biden Malaise, How
America Bounces Back from Joe Biden's dismal repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years. Kim,
thanks so much for joining us, Hi, thanks for having me.
Such an interesting book and such an interesting premise. And folks can see just
from the title of the book right there, it's kind of two parts.
One you really make the case persuasively that Joe Biden is peating the Carter years
in a lot of different ways, and two that the Reagan parallel is the
appropriate way to kind of dig out of the Biden malaise. So if we
can start just with the first part of that, the parallels between the Biden
economy and the Carter economy, And maybe inflation is a great place to start
because you go through a number of different parallels. What is so similar right
now, almost eerily similar when we look at inflation. Yes, so there
are these incredible parallels, and they run across everything inflation for instance, energy,
immigration policy, foreign policy, dismal foreign policy, cultural issues, crime
and streets across country. It really there's almost this eerie echo. But I
really make the case that that is totally unfair to Jimmy Carter, you know,
for no, and because and we go through it subject by subject,
because you know, for instance, take inflation, okay, which you just
mentioned, Jimmy Carter inherited a great number of his problems. Now it's true
he made most of them worse, okay, and phenomenally so. But you
know, we were in the middle of the Great Inflation in the nineteen seventies.
We were already he inherited an inflation rate that is about what we are
now, and he did make it worse, but we had a lot of
trouble already. Joe Biden inflation was two percent when he came into office,
okay, and everything he has managed to take what was an incredibly strong economy
prior to COVID, it was already ready to roar back. And he threw
money at the economy over and over and over again, as we know,
trillions and trillions over two years, encouraged the Fed to continue with sort of
a loose money supply for way too long. So he took a situation and
destroyed it, whereas Jimmy Carter made things worse. And I think the other
thing why this is unfair to Jimmy Carter is that Joe Biden had Jimmy's lessons
to learn from. He was a Senator when Jimmy Carter was the president.
He also he had the lessons of Jimmy Carter and the mistakes, and also
he had the lessons of Ronald Reagan showing us what went right. And nonetheless
he managed to double down and make things worse. You mentioned in the book,
of course, Paul Voker and deregulation, which a lot of people forget,
was sort of impressive under Carter's watch, despite adding to new cabinet agencies
and everything else. But that also raises this interesting question of why Joe Biden
will never have a Paul Voker in fact, you know, maybe his Larry
Summer's example, like he didn't listen to Larry Summers, and that says,
I think something very different about the Democratic Party, or something very important about
why this Democratic Party is is different than the one of the seventies and the
eighties, Doesn't it? I mean, isn't there doesn't it seem impossible that
Joe Biden would would listen to a Paul Voker. Oh? Absolutely, And
I think it's a really important point again about why this comparison is a boat
unfair to Carter. Carter made a lot of mistakes, but you know,
Carter was also a deeply religious man, a moral man. He was not
above admitting when things were not going right. You know, you saw this
in a number of different ways he did. You know, He'd had g.
William Miller was his fed chief prior to Vulker, and it was not
working. Okay, This guy was also maintaining very loose monetary policy. It
finally occurred to Carter that he needed to change course, so he brought Vulker
in and obviously that was a beginning. It was Reagan who benefited from that,
but you know, Carter did have the ability to do it. At
one point, Carter fired half of his cabinet because there were problems in the
economy. Okay, at one point, Carter, after years of not really
caring about the military and military budgets, much like Joe Biden, by the
end of the year he was so concerned about the Soviets invasion of Afghanistan and
what was going on there, he decided to bulk up military budgets. Joe
Biden has never reversed himself in his life. And we know this that he's
a that's partly a character aspect of Biden. He's he's a bit arrogant.
He thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. Okay, but part of
it is because he's not willing to buck his party on anything, and he
likes the fact that we're in this situation. He wants the Fed to keep
easy money policy because he wants to spend more as well too. And you
know, when when the Fed is raising interest rates, it's harder for the
federal government to borrow as well. Energy is a really interesting part as well.
Obviously, people remember the energy malaise to borrow that word in particular from
the Carter years and now the Biden years. It's a very obvious parallel too,
but Biden has sort of just gone all in in ways like there's supply
differences between then and now where he's just like tanking American supply. Um,
can you explain that, flesh out those parallels? Sure, because it's another
great comparer, but also contrast. All right. The easy comparison to Maya
is to say, oh, Jimmy Carter, gas prices were high, gas
lines, Joe Biden. You know, gas prices are high. But obviously
two very different reasons. Again, Jimmy Carter inherited a global oil shock,
all right. We also didn't have a country in the United States that had
much of a domestic oil and gas industry. And curiously, people forget this,
I mean, well, Jimmy Carter liked a micromanage industry overall in terms
of health and safety, etc. He and his party actually deregulated some of
the more hugely regulated industries, including the first steps towards deregulating the oil and
gas markets, which ended up becoming like a straight line to kind of the
fracking revolution we had and the dominance we saw. Joe Biden took a magnificent
energy market one of the first times that we had actually, I mean,
we had become the dominant supplier across the world and in really important swing producer,
which means the ability to kind of influence prices. And because he's in
hock too crazy progressive climate policies, he is systematically destroying that dominance that we
had, and that is a huge difference between him and Carter. Carter would
have killed to have had that kind of energy sector, and he would have
He was not against oile, he was not against gas, he was not
against coal. He was for American independence. He just didn't have that option
at the time. You alluded to this just a moment ago, but you
make the case that Joe Biden is not a leader, that this is something
that's sort of baked into the character of Joe Biden, and I wanted to
ask that in the context of this broader question about why the Democratic Party.
You know somebody who is seen as I guess maybe fairly progressive in some important
ways, but then sort of conservative in different ways, Jimmy Carter for his
time, and now you have Joe Biden, who was the moderate candidate in
twenty twenty, who governing from behind the progressives. Essentially he's letting them totally
like lead the way. What does it tell us about today's Democratic Party that
even their moderate president from the center of their party is not grateful to have
so much American oil supply, is going on these insane economic policies, spending
like a Bandit Isn't that just doesn't it tell something very very sad and scary
about the left right now? Absolutely, And if you look at both of
these men, Carter and Biden, another interesting parallel. They both ran as
these more moderate versions of their party in the primary. Okay, Carter did
it as well. The differences. Carter actually was in many ways. You
know, he was a very kind of curious persons. As you said,
he spread the gamut, spanned the gamut in terms of political views. In
some ways he was very liberal, in other ways he was more conservative.
Sometimes he twists in the wind because of pressure from different constituency groups that it
was out there. But you know, to the extent that Carter had very
few friends in Congress, it's because he did sort of go all over the
place, and he didn't always just fall in line with one side of what
was at that point a very very Democratic Party. Now we have a Joe
Biden, who claimed to be the centrist when he ran in the primaries,
who very much was rescued by voters in the South from what was otherwise likely
to be a Bernie Sanders nomination, and then upon winning the nomination, instantly
turns around and decides he needs to have a unity agenda with Bernie Sanders,
which essentially involved adopting all of Sanders platform for himself. And he's been unwilling,
utterly unwilling to confront any aspect of that part of his party or to
come to the aid and rescue at any time of those key centrists who Democrats
need to be reelected in the House and Senate, they're going to maintain their
majorities. And that's why one reason, by the way, why Republicans are
in control in the House right now is because Biden policies were just too left
for many of these districts where Democratic Centrists are increasingly becoming an endangered species.
You also read about Iran, which it's somewhat interesting that Iran factors into both
presidencies in the way that it does, you know, is there And also,
by the way, just this weekend, we've gotten reports the morality pieces
sort of back on the streets in Iran. You know, things could be
that could be a really big pressure cooker in the second half of Biden's presidency.
What are we looking at in terms of those parallels. Yeah, you
know, Russia factors into both presidencies, Afghanistan factors into both, Iran factors
into bold, China factors into both. Look, Jimmy Carter's presidency essentially ended
with his failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt Joe Biden, but this was also a
problem of Jimmy Carter's own making, because he just hadn't been tough enough and
strong enough on the question of Iran. It's very concerning to me that we
have an Iran that Joe Biden was vice president for eight years under an administration
that insisted that if we just got to a deal with Iran that it would
give up its nuclear ambitions. Here we are, you know, going on
twenty years after those promises were still made, and we have an Iran that's
doubled down on its desire to do this, and to the extent that it
hasn't so far is not because of any reason having to do with the Obama
deal or now Biden's efforts to stop that, but increasingly because Israel has been
much more engaged in attempting to undermine any progress that Iran is making. But
this is kind of a simmering thing. It's been overshadowed by what's going on
in Ukraine and our attentions with China, but it is something that is no
less of a threat than it has been for the last few decades, and
a lot of people on the left, I can just imagine, would object
to Well, let me start with this. There is, like you said,
this like pretty blatant clear lesson of the Carter years in the Reagan years,
especially on economic policy. And I wonder, I mean, what I've
seen as an argument from the left when it comes to Biden deciding to spend
m just crazy amounts of money in the economy that he inherited. Why do
you think it is that, you know, their best defense for that is,
you know, to some extent true that their corporation said, well,
we're going to raise some uh, we're going to raise some prices because of
that. But that's like their best defense that you know, which which could
maybe account for some levels of inflation, but overall nothing, you know,
like the amount of spending that Biden, you know, the crazy spending route
that he went down. So why is it that the left, including you
know, the centrist president himself, has basically no defense um for this sending
that he went on in light of the fact that they have this like glaring
example of the Carter legacy of the Reagan years in front of them. Look,
anybody who is sensible understands why we're having inflation at the moment. Okay,
it's because they threw money at the economy and because that kept interest rates
too low for too long. And you mentioned Larry Summers. Okay, I
mean there are plenty of very good economists who will acknowledge this. They might
have disagreements about the degree of inflation that caused, but everyone understands. I
mean, this is one thing that came out of the nineteen seventies is when
Jimmy Carter took his job, everybody we had this great inflation across the world.
Nobody entirely understood what had caused it. Okay, we were still a
few years away between we had before we had Milton Friedman and others really explaining
better supply side and demand side economics and how this all comes to be.
So you had world leaders everywhere that we're confused about this and just blindly falling
Kanesian policy. We know that we know the problems about that now, right,
And we also had eight years of Reagan explaining how this worked to us
with supply side policies, So no one can claim otherwise anymore. I think
the reason that the best they can say they don't really have an offense is
this is an administration that's very good at pointing fingers and trying to blame others.
And remember, don't forget, we've spent the last two years with Biden
claiming this was Putin's price hych. It's completely bogus. Okay, Putin isn't
raising the cost of milk in America. It's even bogus on the energy price
front. Gas prices were going up in this country well before Putin's invasion of
Ukraine. This isn't happening instead because of Biden energy policies. And it's remarkable
to me that they don't have a better answer to it. Their argument is
to say, well, how many jobs there are, But that is not
an answer to the people that can't afford to go buy the chicken. They
need to pay, you know, to feed their children at night, and
a lot of those areas of goods too. Quite aside from the overall level
of inflation, pockets of it are still exceptionally high, and they happen to
be things that people have to pay on a regular basis from a week to
week in their paychecks. So while inflation is nominally going down, it's not.
For many people in America, they do not feel that it is.
It's interesting because, as you write, the Carter years really paved the way
for the kind of Reagan revolution to finally win out the argument and the Republican
Party. And so you know, if you're sitting somewhere like the Federalist or
the Heritage Foundation or the Law Street Journal right now, you're looking and you're
saying, Hey, this is quite an opportunity for Republicans. And that's sort
of the second part of what you do in the book. You write,
just as democrats would be, why to absorb the lessons of Carter, Republicans
need to remember Reagan. Now, we just saw basically the entire field save
Donald Trump. In conversation with Zucker, Carlson, and Iowa Friday getting pressed
on a bunch of different things. Is there anyone you think is most well
positioned? I'm sure you're going to get this question all the time in your
press tour for this book, But is most well positioned to be the Reagan
in twenty twenty four? Well, right now, none of them, Which
is what my concern is. Just look, the thing about Reagan that people
forget. Why it's so important people remember this now, is Jimmy Carter created
a huge backlash in the country with his policies and with his mismanagement and with
his lack of leadership, and that really bubbled and bubbled, and there always
was likely to be an inclination to vote for a Republican. But Ronald Reagan
didn't just win that election, Okay, he wanted in a blowout, all
right, And then he went on to win an even bigger blowout four years
later. And that was because he fundamentally capitalized on what had become a shift,
all right. This is why we ended up with Reagan Democrats. A
lot of people who felt as though the Democratic Party no longer represented them.
Jimmy Carter and his party had become too liberal. And those Reagan Democrats,
you know what we call them today, We call them the base, okay
of the Republican Party. So this was a guy, Ronald Reagan, who
didn't just win an election, he changed politics in the country for a generation
and beyond. This is the opportunity that is open to Republicans today. Joe
Biden is so unpopular, his policies are so out of keeping with how many
Americans think about things. But it's going to take a leader who has optimism,
who has a vision, who has a little humor and a smile,
who can say, hey, like, we might not as a Republican party
be everything you want, but we're a lot closer to what you care about
than Democrats at the moment. And I think if the party is going to
completely run on very polarizing cultural issues entirely and not talk a little bit more
about an economic agenda, a bright and shiny future, etc. That's going
to be squandering an opportunity. And you write about this, I mean,
this is a lot of people I imagine are going to read a sentence like
this. You write years of liberal norm breaking, bogus FBI investigation, secret
impeachment, proceeding, stripped committee assignments, calls to end the filibuster, and
attempting Republicans to focus on investigations and retribution rather than the business of governance.
And you have covered all of that stuff fantastically. A lot of people will
read that and say, well, why not focus on the investigations and retribution?
Or they'll say why not do both? Is it impossible actually to do
both? To sort of be the forward looking optimists and also sort of get
bogged down in the Trump investigations? Talking about that is are those things mutually
exclusive? Can you do both? What's the right way to handle all that?
Yeah, not at all. They are not mutually exclusive at all.
Call out the abuses. But by the way, tell the nation that you're
going to be the antidote to that. Okay, you're going to be the
leader again, and we are not going to tolerate or normalize the kind of
behavior that we have seen going on. Okay, and yet, and I
know there's going to be a lot of people who call for retribution. All
right, but one of my concerns is, like we as conservad let's just
give an example. Okay, that first impeachment that happened to Donald Trump absolutely
outrageous. It was conducted in a basement. You know, we didn't even
know who the whistleblower was. Adams Ship. Whenever he opens his mouth,
it's unlikely any truth is coming out of it. Okay, there was a
lot of problems with that impeachment, but I think that that's because, by
the way, impeachments need to be very very rare. They need to be
saved for the most horrible of circumstances. They also need to be saved for
the moment in which you have such evidence of wrongdoing that you've convinced eighty ninety
percent of the country that this person can no longer stay in office. I'm
not quite sure that's the standard that we now hear from any Republicans who are
demanding that there be an impeachment of Joe Biden. They've certainly not convinced eighty
or ninety percent of the public that that's the case. So we need a
leader who can talk about this a little bit more, but who also promises
is going to be that person who wants to reinforce some of these norms and
bring people together. It doesn't mean that you can't call out the abuses of
the past. In fact, you need to, and you need to talk
about the radicalism on the other side as you bring people together there. But
there's a lot that Republicans can be talking about that is optimistic. I fear
very much that everyone feels that the ticket to the nomination is to show that
you are angrier than the other person about what's going on. And you know
that wasn't Reagan's way. Reagan, you know, he showed indignation about the
mismanagement of the country, but he also was just so optimistic about the future
of the nation too. And you know, I'm a huge fan of things
like the child tax credit. But a lot of Republicans seem to think in
order to win, like it's it's politically, the way to win people to
your side is is to sort of go the Democrat route, use hands the
right, which you know, I guess has been successful for Democrats to some
extent. But Ronald Reagan, for instance, won the youth vote. He
won, as you actually point this out in the book, basically every income
cop cohort except for the very lowest, although he won forty six percent of
that, so a huge chunk of those voters, um was had good relationships
with unions, etc. On a you know, Milton Friedman free market type
economic agenda. How should candidates be talking about that right now, especially when
so many of their own voters have suffered, you know, from from decades
in some cases of malaise in their own communities, offshoring the way it's hit
different pockets of the country in different ways. How should Republicans be having those
conversations? You know, one thing I always love Grover Northwest always called the
Reagan Coalition the leave us alone coalition, um, you know, and it's
what held together in particular economic libertarians, but also social conservatives as well too,
because you know, Reagan really made the case. He's like, we're
never going to attack you and your but we also you want your community.
We want so much of what is good and is happening in America to be
happening through our institutions outside of government, through your churches, through your community
centers, etc. And this was something that held everything together. I think
Republicans need to be making a similar case at the moment. You know.
Instead, as you say, there's a populist element that is waiting in democrat
light, as it were you know, we'll give you more tax breaks than
they give you, but we'll do it for the policies we like instead of
the policies they like. You know, we'll have regulation that's more enlightened.
I mean. One of the things that kind of bothered me recently, you
know, when House Republicans were running, and they did when the majority in
the House, but they had all these policies saying, you know, we're
going to have a national parent Bill of Rights. You know, No,
how about we just get rid of the Department of Education, which is the
thing that is forcing all of this policy on local schools with the threat of
not sending along federal tax dollars unless schools adopt Biden's transgender policies, etc.
So, instead of trying to retroactively help everybody at the back end from these
kind of horrible policies that are happening out of Washington, with a parental national
parental Bill of Rights and the Department of Education take some of the money to
how to give it to the state's first voucher programs and then let the governors
get on with dealing like as you know, Rhonda Santists did in Florida with
dealing because schools should be a state and local issue anyway, Like why is
the federal government even involved in this policy. That's what I'd like to see
more coming out of candidates is instead of again chasing after Democrats and try to,
you know, retroactively give guarantees that fix problems they've made, how about
we get the government out of our life and then we were not going to
need those protections in the first place. Yes, it's amazing with the fact
Ramaswamy taking a real new right l as I've said, come out in favor
of ethanol. It just like small government populism is actually probably the morally and
politically palatable version of populism, not the ethanol subsidies populism. Many times you
pay for ethanol, You pay for it like three times, and it doesn't
even do anything. It does nothing. All you do is pay. It's
just like a big rip off ethanol. I could talk for hours on ethanol.
So, speaking of the big rip off, I was talking to the
author of a book called The Big rip Off, Tim Carney about ethanol the
other day, and he was mentioning how it just destroys all his small engines
in addition to being horrible, it's absolutely horrible for everything you own. And
it's entirely this legacy of let's just say it's a farm subsidy, okay,
And it was tenuous when we came up with it if there was an environmental
but if there's absolutely no provement benefit now and all it does is transfer money
from one group of trans taxpayers to Kansas, then and as my colleague Tristan
Justice wrote last week, Ted Cruz one Iowa without coming out in favor of
ethan all subsidies, So you can do it. It can be done well.
And on that note, I just I want to talk as we're wrapping
up here about those cultural questions. You mentioned that Reagan didn't lead with culture
issues but had a pretty you know, he would say bold, bold collars,
not pale pastels when it came to culture, probably would be how he'd
describe it. And I'm wondering about something like DeSantis, a six week abortion
band, which a lot of pundits have looked at and said he signed it,
you know, late on a Friday night. He definitely hasn't led with
it. He did sign it though, as opposed to the sort of fifteen
week question that a lot of people are debating here in Washington, DC.
And that's not just when it comes to abortion. I mean, obviously DeSantis's
foot forward has been culture issues, has been he says he's going to take
out the Department of Education. He's passed legislation. Some of it people think
is weaponizing government. Some people on the right have disagreements with it. So
what is the balance? You know, if you are the person the architect
of a DeSantis campaign or Nicky Haley campaign, or even a Donald Trump campaign,
how would you advise them to talk about these issues? So I would
start again from the Reagan perspective of first of all, guaranteeing that if you
were to become president, that you're going to make sure that government isn't weaponized
against those who are against those who are different than you. From a social
perspective, right, I mean, look at the attacks that the Obama administration
has has waged on like Little Sisters of the Poor over contraception, etc.
Look at the pushback that we've had against the High Amendment in recent uh in
this recent administration and attempts to to get rid of that limit on taxpayer funds
to pay for abortions. Look at the Apartment of Defense at the moment,
very ostentatiously going around the High Amendment to pay for women to ablem places,
which somebody is deeply offensive. So I'd start by guaranteeing something that hasn't been
necessarily a case, which is to say that I'm not going to let the
federal government come after you for your religious rights and because you have different views.
And that was my point about the Department of Education. If the Department
of Education is attacking parents of views, then let's get rid of the Department
of Education, right, So that would be the first thing I would do.
And then, you know, I think that people want to know that
their leaders have the views that they have. I do not believe that a
six week ban is necessarily the you know, as controversialist. Some had said.
Kemp signed one in Georgia and was reelected. Ohio signed one. Dwine
was reelected. You know, but you have to make the case. And
this is where I think Republicans have also gotten wrong, is that they're not
doing a good enough job of explaining why it's the other sides that is extremists.
Okay, the vast majority of America believe that abortion should be legal,
but with restrictions on it somewhere. Okay, that's where seventy or eighty percent
of the country are. The crazy people are those on the other side who
don't think that there should be any restrictions on it at any point. And
the GOP is going to have to do a better job. And that's a
uniting view, right when you get into these hot button issues. If you
want to pull more people into your party, into your movement, you have
to talk about what unites us, all right, And that's a little worry
I think I have right now at the field, as everyone's attitude is,
if you're not right where I am on abortion, then you must be a
bad person. And I don't think any future leader the conservative movement can afford
to alienate people that way on these issues. There's a lot more that unites
us in this country than divides us. Kim Strausso is the author of the
Biden Malaise, how America bounce us back from Joe Aiden's dismal repeat of the
Jimmy Carter years, and of course a member of the editorial board over at
the Wall Street Journal, Kim, We'll have to do another podcast at some
point about ethanol. Yes, let's do an anthanol, saying that I would
love that. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We really
appreciate it. Thank you, thanks for having me. Of course you've been
listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Joshinsky, culture
editor here at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then,
be lovers of freedom and anxious for the frame