On the Monday edition of Inside Politics, CNN fill-in hosts Dana Bash and Phil Mattingly were frustrated that voters continued to believe their lying eyes when it came to the economy. Both Bash and Mattingly pulled out the tired excuse that cable pundits have been using since Biden first took office: Biden’s poll numbers aren’t bad because the economy is bad; they’re bad because voters just don’t understand how good things are.

Bash framed the discussion as though President Biden and his administration were the protagonists of the story: “Think about the frustrations that I know you hear, covering the White House... there have been, from their perspective, economic gains, and they’re not getting credit for it.”

She continued:

Just look at the latest Quinnipiac poll numbers that we can put up on the screen. And it really actually shows, first of all, if you look at now, 38% of the people in this poll approve of Biden’s handling of this economy, 57% disapprove. So he’s doing better if you look at the trend starting back in March, but he’s still very much underwater. And they believe that it’s because they can’t get their message out.”

“That they can’t break through,” Mattingly added. Perhaps the problem, he suggested, was that the Biden administration was too focused on scoring wins for the American people, and not focused enough on communicating those wins: “It’s a contradiction that I always kind of get a kick out of when talking to administration officials who make the point that, you know, “We’re not here to get the big, flashy headlines. We’re governing. We’re getting stuff done. We have a legislative record.’”

Mattingly went on:

If you don’t want to make the headlines, if you don’t want to drive the news necessarily, maybe people aren’t going to pay attention to a resumé, a record that you believe should resonate…
As you know well, they’ve been confronting this for their entire time in office: things that they thought they succeeded on, a record that they thought people should absolutely respond to in a positive manner, that people just don’t seem to be able to settle on.

The only panelist who would even acknowledge the glaring issues with the economy was Atlantia Journal-Constitution correspondent Tia Mitchell. She saw these problems, particularly inflation, as responsible for a “disconnect” between the White House’s messaging and the actual experiences of voters. “What people are feeling at home is different than the message [administration officials] are portraying,” she explained.

So it’s hard for them to receive a message from the president saying, “Hey, you guys are doing better, look what I’ve done.” It’s just — I think there’s a disconnect there that quite frankly, there’s no easy answer for how the White House deals with that disconnect, because they don’t really have a way to fix it.

But while Mitchell acknowledged some of the problems facing American consumers, she stopped short of suggesting that the current administration might be the cause of any of them. Instead, she and the rest of the panel treated the poor state of the economy as something entirely outside of the White House’s control.

On CNN, the economy under a Democratic president is an arbitrarily fluctuating, chaotic force of nature — until a Republican takes over, at which point it neatly arranges itself into a set of easily-manipulated levers.