Axios has a fascinating piece of journalism comparing the use of the term “Bidenomics” month to month by Democrats and Republicans. What had started as mockery, with Republicans eager to pin high inflation and economic unease on the president, making for an intuitive neologism of “Bidenomics,” underwent a few months in which Democrats attempted to turn the phrase to their ends. While “Obamacare” has lived a successful zombie existence in common parlance and the basement of Chief Justice Roberts’s home, “Bidenomics” never stuck (probably because the most public-facing aspects of the economy remain in a rut), and Democrats are doing their best to remove it from the lexicon.

From Axios:

The intrigue: After Axios asked the White House why Biden wasn’t saying “Bidenomics” — including in his State of the Union address this month — he used the term at a Tuesday afternoon event in North Carolina.

• It was the first time he’d done so since Jan. 25.
• “Leading economists aren’t making much fun of ‘Bidenomics’ anymore,” he said of his programs to boost the middle class through public spending. “They’re thinking maybe it works!”

Flashback: The president has had an off-and-on relationship with “Bidenomics” during the past year, however.

• Biden initially was reluctant to use the term, but last June he decided to embrace it. His advisers calculated that voters were going to blame — or credit — him for the country’s economy regardless of what anyone called it.
• The goal was to co-opt Biden’s Republican critics and do for “Bidenomics” what former President Obama did with “Obamacare” — take a word that seemed a political liability and turn it into an asset.

In recent months, though, “Bidenomics” mentions by Biden, Democrats in Congress and others in the party have fallen off a table.

• It’s a shift that amounted to an acknowledgement that the White House’s messaging effort was falling flat with many voters.

It would appear that while “It’s the economy, stupid” may not be the deciding factor this November — considering the populace’s exceptionally strong feelings about Donald Trump — Democrats aren’t eager to have the face of their party attached by name to the lack of visceral economic rejuvenation the U.S. has experienced in the past four years.

Biden is right to bury Bidenomics, or else it may bury him.