Some folks on the right are giving CNN’s Erin Burnett grief for not correcting President Biden when he claimed, falsely, that “inflation was nine percent when I came to office. Nine percent.”
As you probably remember, the year-over-year inflation rate in January 2021 was just 1.4 percent. It jumped to 5 percent in May 2021, rose all the way to 9.1 percent in June 2022, and is currently at 3.5 percent as of March – down from the peak, but still above the 2 percent goal. Inflation was 5 percent or higher for 23 straight months.
But credit Burnett for at least setting up the question with a litany of statistics showcasing the downside of the economy during the Biden years:
So, when you talk about the economy, of course, it is by far the most important issue for voters. It’s also true right now, Mr. President, that voters, by a wide margin, trust Trump more on the economy. They say that in polls, and part of the reason for that may be the numbers. And you’re aware of many of these, of course. The cost of buying a home in the United States is double what it was, when you look at your monthly costs, from before the pandemic. Real income, when you account for inflation, is actually down, since you took office, Economic growth last week, far short of expectations. Consumer confidence, maybe no surprise, is near a two-year low. With less than six months to go to Election Day. are you worried that you’re running out of time to turn that around?
Not a softball question! Biden, of course, rejected the premise and insisted the economy was thriving.
We’ve already turned it around. Look, look at the Michigan survey. For 65 percent of the American people think they’re in good shape economically. They think the nation is not in good shape. They’re personally in good shape. The polling data has been wrong all along. How many of you guys do a poll, CNN, how many folks you have to call?
Leave it to Biden to begin an answer by citing recent public opinion survey numbers to defend his record, and then adding, “the polling data has been wrong all along.”
Maybe Biden’s claim that inflation was 9 percent when he left office was a clumsy attempt to gaslight the public. Or maybe that’s actually what Biden remembers. Special counsel Robert Hur said he did not find it worthwhile to pursue a case against Biden because a jury would see the president “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
A lot of Biden critics see the president as a shameless fabulist and BS artist. That may well be the case, but I suspect that if we hooked Biden up to a polygraph, the machine would indicate that Biden did not believe he was lying when he says he “used to drive an 18-wheeler,” or that he was arrested while protesting for civil rights, or that he always opposed the Iraq War, or that he was “raised in the black church politically,” or that he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and so on.
A lot of people like to believe that they have a steel-trap memory. Brain research indicates that this is rarely the case; each time we remember something, it’s not like consulting a photograph; our brain “re-paints the picture” and often subtly alters it.
The answer returns us to a troubling recent theory known as memory reconsolidation. In essence, reconsolidation is rooted in the fact that every time we recall a memory we also remake it, subtly tweaking the neuronal details. Although we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them, they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. What’s disturbing, of course, is that we can’t help but borrow many of our memories from elsewhere, so that the ad we watched on television becomes our own, part of that personal narrative we repeat and retell.
This idea, simple as it seems, requires us to completely re-imagine our assumptions about memory. It reveals memory as a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. The recall is altered in the absence of the original stimulus, becoming less about what we actually remember and more about what we’d like to remember. It’s the difference between a “Save” and the “Save As” function. Our memories are a “Save As”: They are files that get rewritten every time we remember them, which is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.
Biden remembers an altered version of events that always makes him look better. Thus, gasoline was five dollars a gallon when he took office, inflation was 9 percent, etc.