Oliver Wiseman

The wages of Biden’s energy mistake It would be naïve in the extreme to be surprised about a politician taking credit for things that go well but sticking his hands up with a “who me?” look of innocence when things go badly. Nevertheless, the incoherence of the White House response to OPEC+’s decision to cut oil production has been something to behold. In a testy joint statement Wednesday, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan expressed the president’s “disappointment” at the “shortsighted decision.” Deese and Sullivan crowbar in a half-hearted plug for the Inflation Reduction Act, arguing that the OPEC news underscores the importance of transitioning to green energy.

Crisis of the American man “Important” is an overused word in the book trade; there are no prizes for modest understatement on dust jackets and in publishers’ press releases. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a few years’ time, we look back on the publication of Of Boys and Men, a new book by the Brookings Institution fellow Richard V. Reeves, as an important moment in overlapping debates over masculinity, feminism and gender. Reeves, a center-left moderate working at a bastion of establishment liberalism, has written a short, carefully argued book that rings the alarm on the crisis facing boys and men in America, and in the West more generally.

The GOP comeback With just thirty-six days to go until Election Day, and at the start of a new week and a new month, now seems as good a time as any to take a big-picture look at the state of the midterm race. And the picture looks to be a lot rosier for Republicans than it was even a few weeks ago. The latest piece of good news for the GOP comes courtesy of Monmouth University. Their latest survey’s results were published today and record a three-point Republican lead on the question of which party voters would rather control Congress. That comes a month after a seven-point lead for Democrats in August. Things are looking up for Republicans on other fronts too.

Biden, Meloni and the meaning of democracy Speaking at a Democratic Party fundraiser on Wednesday night, Joe Biden delivered a familiar message about democracy. The fight between “democracy and autocracy” is domestic and international, he said. “Democracy is at stake,” he warned and, as evidence of the global threats to democracy he said, “you saw what’s happened in Italy in that election.” As you have probably read by now, the result of that election was that Italy now has its most conservative prime minister since World War Two: Giorgia Meloni, the triumphant leader of the Brothers of Italy Party. And the US president’s response to that outcome demonstrates the problem with the “democracy versus autocracy” prism through which he views the world.

The idiocy of the Jones Act In Puerto Rico, hundreds of thousands of Americans are without power thanks to the damage done by Hurricane Fiona. The island’s governor, Pedro Pierluisi, has warned of a shortage of diesel fuel needed to keep generators running that threatens lives and security. To this serious problem there is a straightforward solution: a ship with 300,000 barrels of diesel is floating offshore. The only issue is that for the ship to dock in Puerto Rico and deliver that diesel would be illegal. Puerto Ricans are getting a painful lesson in the idiocy of the Jones Act, the century-old legislation that requires goods shipped between points in the United States be carried on ships that are US-flagged, US-built and mostly US-owned.

Could Putin go nuclear?  When national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned of “catastrophic consequences” for Russia if it uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine on ABC News’s Sunday Show, This Week, he was acknowledging that the war in Ukraine has entered a dangerous new phase. The warning, he said, had been communicated “directly, privately to the Russians at very high levels.” And it comes after Vladimir Putin, having suffered major territorial setbacks in Eastern Ukraine, last week announced a partial mobilization, called up reservists and made a nuclear threat that was more immediate and explicit than he has done in the past. In what amounts to a redrawing of Putin’s red line, Russia is in the process of annexing parts of Ukraine. Sham referenda were held last week.

The revealing opposition to Manchin’s permitting proposal The clock is ticking and Joe Manchin is no closer to getting the energy permitting reform he was promised when he signed on to a slimmed-down spending bill early in the summer. Talking at the Global Clean Energy Action Forum in Pittsburgh today, the West Virginia senator said that “by next week we’ll either have a permitting process that accelerates and lets us compete on a global basis of how we do things and brings things to market or not and politics gets in the way.” Getting his legislation passed will, he added, take “an awful lot of heavy lifting.” Over to you, Chuck Schumer.

The delusions of Bidenomics “I am sick and tired of trickle-down economics. It has never worked. We’re building an economy from the bottom up and the middle out.” So tweeted the president this week. It’s not the first time Joe Biden has taken aim at “trickle-down economics.” And the phrase “middle out” has become a frequent refrain of his. It’s also the title of a new book by Michael Tomasky. The editor of the New Republic, editor in chief of Democracy and a longstanding progressive voice in debates in Washington, Tomasky is a high priest of American liberalism. His book applauds the leftwards march of the president and his party and tries to add context and flesh-on-the-bone to what Biden himself called a change to the “economic paradigm” in the spring of 2021.

Biden’s Taiwan tangle is not good enough Joe Biden could not have been clearer in his 60 Minutes interview last night. In an exchange about Taiwan, reporter Scott Pelley asked: “Would US forces defend the island?” The president responded: “Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.” What happened next followed a familiar script. As Pelley narrated: “After our interview a White House official told us US policy has not changed. Officially, the US will not say whether American forces would defend Taiwan. But the commander-in-chief had a view of his own.” The segment then cut back to the conversation between Pelley and Biden.

Should you trust the polls? One must pay close attention to keep up with the mood among Democrats about the ever-nearing midterms. Over the summer, utter despair gave way to a “hey, maybe things won’t be quite as apocalyptic as we feared.” This very cautious optimism soon morphed into confidence that unappealing GOP candidates, Dark Brandon’s brilliance, and Dobbs’s awfulness were conspiring to deliver an embarrassing result for the GOP. Coming down from that late-summer high, liberals have found a familiar focus for their anxiety: the polls. “Yes, the polling warning signs are flashing again,” read the headline of a piece by the New York Times’s polling guru Nate Cohn on Monday.

Biden throws an inflation party Yesterday’s inflation report was a reality check for the US economy. After a summer of easing price rises, economists expected the August numbers to bring more good news. Instead, the data suggested there remains a long way to go in the fight against inflation. The consumer price index rose year-on-year by 8.3 percent, down from 8.5 percent in July. But core CPI, a measure which excludes volatile energy and food prices, was up 6.3 percent in August over the same time last year, a rise on 5.9 percent in both June and July. As inflation clairvoyant Laurence Summers put in, the report “confirms that the US has a serious inflation problem.

Manchin’s energy bargain   Is Joe Manchin about to be betrayed by his party? When the West Virginia senator unexpectedly changed his tune on a large spending bill earlier this summer, he did so as part of a deal. He would back the green subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act if Democratic leadership backed an overhaul of the energy permitting process. Given progressives’ hostility to fossil fuels, the politics of this deal were never going to be straightforward. And sure enough, a gang of left-wing Democratic senators is gearing up for a blue-on-blue fight over the legislation.

The Queen who captivated America The tributes and messages of condolence issued since the death of Queen Elizabeth II yesterday speak for themselves. In Washington, the statements came flooding in from about as wide an array of American public figures as it is possible to imagine. The president and every living former president shared fond remembrances of their interactions with her. Lawmakers and governors commented on the news. Even state representatives and small-town mayors felt compelled to express their admiration for the woman who was, until yesterday, the world’s longest-serving sitting monarch. Baseball players paused for a moment’s silence before the first pitch. Flowers were laid at the British embassy in Washington.

The Democrats’ John Fetterman problem Democrats have a candidate problem. He’s called John Fetterman. As you may already know, the party’s candidate to fill the all-important Pennsylvania Senate seat that will be vacated by Pat Toomey suffered a stroke on the eve of the Democratic primary and then took an extended break from the campaign trail while he recovered. While he was away from the limelight, Fetterman opened up a considerable polling lead over Mehmet Oz, who has frustrated Republicans with a rather low-energy and flat-footed pivot from the primary to the general. But the dynamics of the race have changed ever since Fetterman returned to the campaign trail. His public appearances have not been reassuring.

Democracy for dummies  Allow me to indulge in a quick thought experiment. Let’s assume that Biden is exactly right when he says, as he did in his primetime address last night, that the extremism of “MAGA Republicans… threatens the very foundations of our republic.” In this experiment, the dark diagnosis is the truth and Biden knows it to be the truth. What should a responsible president do under such circumstances? The answer, as my colleague Matt Purple put it in his must-read reaction to the speech, is to seek to vanquish election denialism and ugly conspiracy theories by “working to bring [Trump supporters] back into the national fold” rather than “treating them like the enemy — which will drive them deeper into the MAGA maw.

Hidden agenda The Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby, who helped deliver victories for a generation of conservative politicians both Down Under and in Britain, had a mantra with which he would urge his clients to focus on the core message: “Get the barnacles off the boat.” The idea isn’t exactly revolutionary but it’s an important reminder of good political practice: voters only pay so much attention — and so to maximize your chances of victory, don’t waste time on policies and promises that distract from your core message to the electorate. In recent days, a number of Republican candidates have brought their boats ashore, fired up the high-pressure hose and blasted a few barnacles off the hull.

Republicans refocus after Mar-a-Lago distraction Three weeks have passed since fifteen boxes of documents were seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago. The breathless reporting about the unprecedented search has faded into the kind of Trump-criminal-investigation white noise with which Americans have lived with for half a decade now, and Republican defenses of the former president are far less enthusiastic than they were immediately after the sweep. As the New York Times observes, the former president’s most loyal defenders paid notably little attention to Friday’s publication of a heavily redacted affidavit that revealed more details about what was taken from Trump’s residence and why.

Biden’s student debt gamble is about 2024 — not 2022 Two days on from Biden’s student debt announcement and any level-headed political cost-benefit analysis of the move would not make for pretty reading in the White House. After months of umming and aahing over the move, the administration’s rollout of the measure is strikingly undercooked. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre struggled to give remotely satisfactory responses to the main objections in yesterday’s briefing. She could not say how much debt forgiveness would cost. She struggled to explain the legal basis for the executive action. Asked why affluent lawyers were included, or queried on the basic unfairness of the measure for those who paid off their debts, she could do little more than filibuster and waffle.

Debt cancellation is Biden at his cynical worst Back in Washington after his Rehoboth vacation, President Biden is tanned, rested and, reportedly, ready to do something extremely dumb by making a back-to-school announcement on student debt cancellation. This morning, the president tweeted the outline of his plan and promised more details this afternoon. The headline pledge is an extension of the pandemic freeze on debt repayments for another four months and $10,000 in loan forgiveness for borrowers earning less than $125,000. By pulling the trigger and acceding to the progressive clamor for loan forgiveness there is, at least, a neat symmetry to Biden’s folly.

When the American Dream is a ‘dog whistle’ High on the list of reasons why American politics feels so bad-blooded, chaotic and dysfunctional is the determination of many members of the media to paint the normal and harmless as unprecedented and dangerous. For the latest example of this pathology, look no further than the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, where prime real estate was afforded to an article explaining that “In US politics, even the phrase ‘The American Dream’ divides.” The starting point for the story, by national politics reporter Jazmine Ulloa, is the large number of unorthodox Republican candidates for office this cycle, many of them Latinos and many of them, as the story puts it, with “powerful come-from-behind stories.