Kicking ass!

Everything Is Awesome (Again!)

Despite what politicians tell you, things are actually going pretty well in America. Here’s why Harris might want to consider admitting that.

Opinion by Michael Grunwald

The public may be grumpy, and politicians may be pitching doom and gloom, but it’s once again time for some great news: America is kicking ass! We are, as The Economist proclaimed on its cover this week, “The Envy of the World.”

The stock market just hit another all-time high. The uninsured rate is near an all-time low. Apartment construction hasn’t been this hot in half a century. Crime, inflation and illegal immigration are falling. Economic growth, job growth and wage growth are strong. The U.S. is no longer at war in Iraq, Afghanistan or, at least officially, anywhere else and its carbon emissions are declining, because its clean energy production is soaring. It’s still the richest and greatest nation on Earth, the land of opportunity that spawned the artificial intelligence boom, ultimate fighting, SpaceX and the Hawk Tuah multimedia empire. And our short national nightmare is over, because after 11 months without adorable cuddle-monsters, the National Zoo just took custody of two giant pandas.

The column debuted in 2014, and the point was never really that everything was awesome — the headline was a joke inspired by a song from The Lego Movie that came out that year — but that most things in America were getting better. The larger point was that most people, and politicians, seemed convinced things in America were getting worse, regardless of the facts on the ground.

That’s true again now. Half of Americans believe unemployment is at a 50-year high, when it’s actually near a 50-year low. Two of every three voters say the country is on the wrong track, even though new business applications are at a record high, teen birth rates are at record lows and America’s economy has grown more than twice as fast as Europe’s since Covid.

This gap between perception and reality seems particularly relevant in an election year, as former President Donald Trump rips America as a crime-ridden, inflation-ravaged dystopia overrun by vicious migrants with bad genes. At the same time, current Vice President Kamala Harris has mostly declined to make the case that the state of the nation is better than people think, arguing instead that Trump would make it worse and it’s time to turn the page.

If that sounds familiar, well, it was definitely a theme of the 2016 edition of Everything Is Awesome, when Trump first won the presidency on a promise to Make America Great Again and ended up burying this franchise for seven years. Now that things actually are awesome again, it’s worth remembering what can happen to incumbent parties when they’re unwilling to say so.

The Everything Is Awesome franchise began after the Republican landslide in the 2014 midterms, when 62 percent of the electorate was describing the economy as “poor” even though it was growing at a roaring 5 percent rate. We continued it in late 2015, because the Democratic and Republican candidates running to succeed former President Barack Obama were all portraying the country as an apocalyptic hellscape, even though things were objectively getting even better. This grouchy zeitgeist was the central paradox of the late Obama era and I wanted to make an evidence-based case for holiday cheer over negativity bias and for data over vibes.

The tradition continued in 2016, because almost everything in America was still on an excellent trajectory, even though Trump had just gotten elected after a wildly mendacious campaign claiming the unemployment figures were rigged, crime was at an all-time high and everything was awful. Of course, as soon as Trump took office, he started taking credit for all the awesome trends he had denied on the trail. The 2017 column acknowledged the economy was still doing well on Trump’s watch, but it was way less celebratory, because honestly, Trump was scaring me with his constant lies, racist retweets, obsequiousness towards monstrous dictators and flagrantly corrupt and anti-democratic behavior. That all seemed sub-awesome.

So I suspended the tradition in 2018, even though the economy was still humming. I certainly wasn’t going to revive it after Covid, which destroyed any trace of economic awesomeness, and then the Jan. 6 insurrection, a national trauma that confirmed my worst fears about Trump. And even after the pandemic faded and things calmed down, the country had bad data and worse vibes.

But now I’m back after a seven-year hiatus, because America is back, and Americans are again failing to recognize how awesome we’re doing.

Just as the 2008 financial meltdown and subsequent recession helped elect Obama, but also forced him to govern through hard times, the 2020 pandemic and subsequent recession left Joe Biden with the presidency and a mess. And once again, Americans have remained grumpy despite an impressive recovery.

The initial complaints focused on soaring gas prices, which, as Trump often points out, plunged below $2 a gallon on his watch, because, as Trump never points out, demand plummeted after the economy shut down and everyone stopped driving. After the economy reopened, gas topped $5 a gallon on Biden’s watch, but now the national average is down to $3.20. Better! There have also been persistent complaints about rising costs of food, housing and everything else and inflation did rise to an extremely non-awesome 9 percent in 2022 — partly because the Trump and Biden administrations had poured so much cash into the economy to keep families and businesses afloat during the pandemic. But inflation is now down to 2.4 percent, just above the Federal Reserve’s target, the lowest rate of any G7 country.

Even though inflation is under control, wages have risen faster than prices and the rest of the world has faced much worse inflation, it’s still understandable that Americans are upset about prices that remain high by historic standards. It’s less understandable that three of every five of us believe we’re in a recession when the U.S. economy has grown steadily for three years. It’s now significantly larger than it was before Covid, with the strongest growth in the G7. The stock market keeps breaking records, foreclosures keep falling, the manufacturing sector is finally booming and Republican governors and mayors keep bragging about their vibrant state and local economies. Unemployment has dropped from 14.8 percent during Covid to 4.1 percent today, yet again the best in the G7. In the immortal words of Jim Harbaugh: “Who’s got it better than us?”

Trump continues to portray America as a hellhole under invasion by migrant hordes, but while it’s true that illegal border crossings initially soared under Biden, they’ve now dropped to their lowest levels since Covid. Fatal drug overdoses are also dropping for the first time in decades, even though Trump makes it sound like Biden and Harris have conspired with cartels to blast fentanyl into the country. And even though three of every four Americans believe crime is increasing, they’re wrong; violent crime rates and property crime rates are declining, and they’re lower than they were in 2020. Of course, U.S. combat-related military deaths are also way down, because U.S. troops are no longer in official combat zones.

There’s not much media coverage of soldiers who aren’t dying, crimes that aren’t happening or a quieter southern border. The press rarely covers planes that land safely and stories about soaring gas prices or economists predicting a recession get more clicks than stories about gas prices returning to normal or the recession failing to materialize. Even stories that acknowledge the good economic news, and this one probably counts, tend to focus on the Biden-Harris failure to communicate the good news and the public’s failure to recognize it, with headlines like “Why many Americans still feel bad about the economy despite strong data” or “The Economy Is Good. Why Don’t People Know It?” Honestly, I don’t know the answer, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to tell them more clearly than we have.

Again, my point is not that everything is totally awesome. Even though the economy is strong overall, some Americans are still struggling. Non-awesome things keep happening, like hurricanes and school shootings and the death of James Earl Jones. Nobody is happy about the fighting in the Middle East, or the fighting over the fighting on college campuses. The planet is getting hotter and we haven’t done much to prevent the next pandemic. It’s definitely not awesome that our politics have gotten so polarized and our information environment so dysfunctional, that the public is so wildly misinformed about such basic facts.

But things are getting better in America and people shouldn’t feel like it’s cringe or elitist or politically incorrect to say so. I’m thinking of one person in particular who shouldn’t feel like that.

The first question of last month’s presidential debate: “Vice President Harris, you and President Biden were elected four years ago, and your opponent often asks his supporters: ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?”

Her answer: “Four years ago, unemployment was 8 percent, the deficit was $3 trillion and the U.S. was enduring its worst year of growth since World War II. We’ve cut unemployment and the deficit in half, and we’ve got robust growth again. Of course, Americans are better off than they were under this guy!”

My bad, that’s not at all what she said. Her actual non-response was: “I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America.” She went on like that for a while, promising a $6,000 tax cut for families and a $50,000 tax deduction for small businesses, but she never answered the question.

She never said: Yes. Obviously. Much better off.

In fairness, Harris and her campaign team have seen the polling that suggests most Americans still think the economy sucks. She’s understandably eager to create some distance from her unpopular boss and his unpopular economic policies. There’s even some evidence that her efforts to run as the candidate of change are working, that voters aren’t associating her with the Biden economy. And overall, she clearly gave Trump a whupping on the debate stage.

Still, the question of whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago is the question most elections are about — and if the candidate who’s been in national leadership for the last four years doesn’t think so, voters might wonder why not. I’m having flashbacks to the Democratic primary debates of 2016 when, after eight years of steady economic improvement under a Democratic president, Bernie Sanders doom-and-gloomed about the “massive despair all over the country” and how “almost everyone is getting poorer,” while Hillary Clinton chastised him for keeping his malaise so general, rather than recognizing the specific despair of African Americans, women, immigrants, gays and “hardworking immigrant families living in fear.” I wrote at the time: “The candidates of both parties are spending their time on national television telling Americans the country is in shambles. The problem for Democrats is that Americans may believe them.”

It’s politically impressive that Harris seems to be persuading some low-information voters that she’s the candidate of change, but many of them might notice she’s the sitting vice president. There’s only so far she can distance herself from a boss who works in the same office. This is why the Trump campaign is running ads from that bygone time when she was just a running mate, loyally declaring: “We are very proud of Bidenomics. Bidenomics is working!”

That would not be a wise campaign slogan for Harris right now, but the Yahoo Finance Bidenomics Report Card, which tracks metrics like jobs, wages, exports and GDP, did just upgrade the president’s grade to an A. Bidenomics may not be popular, but the Biden administration’s investments in infrastructure, semiconductors, rural high-speed internet and clean energy technologies like solar power have produced direct results that are worth bragging about — and during the vice presidential debate, Tim Walz did briefly tout America’s ongoing manufacturing boom.

It would be politically suicidal for Harris to claim that Everything Is Awesome when the country (and the world, as incumbents keep learning the hard way) is still in such a bad mood. But when she says it’s time to “turn the page and chart a new way forward,” implicitly conceding things are bad, the danger once again is that Americans might believe her. And when the data-mangling former president who lost jobs on his watch is urging voters to Make America Great Again, it’s an opportunity for the quasi-incumbent whose administration has created 16 million jobs to remind voters that America is already great. She can make a case that things are already better than they were under Trump and she’ll make them even better than they’ve been under Biden.

Because America truly is great! It’s the land of McChicken $5 Meal Deals, the Constitution, Netflix and, until Trump came along, peaceful transitions of power. Employers are still hiring, obesity is actually declining and what do you know: A new Lego movie came out last week. It’s an awesome time to live in the United States of America, which is why so many migrants are trying to come here. We shouldn’t take it for granted, because you never know: Next year might not be so awesome.