President Joe Biden is old enough to remember the 1990s, so he is hoping a government shutdown and impeachment can turn around his dismal poll numbers and secure him a second term.
That’s how it worked for former President Bill Clinton, who was able to parlay the government shutdowns of 1995-96 into a successful reelection campaign after Democrats lost their congressional majorities. Then in Clinton’s second term, his poll numbers only went up when he was impeached for lying under oath about his sexual impropriety.
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This time, Republicans are flirting with a government shutdown and pursuing impeachment at the same time. That’s not something that happened in the days of Newt Gingrich.
Assistant White House press secretary Michael Kikukawa sent reporters a “split screen” on Thursday contrasting Biden and House Republicans.
“On one side: President Biden, who is focused on delivering for the American people,” he wrote. “On the other: Extreme Congressional Republicans whose priorities are a reckless, partisan laundry list beholden to the far-right ideologues in their caucus.”
“While President Biden has been in New York this week showcasing America’s global leadership on the world stage, extreme House Republicans are consumed by chaos and marching our country toward a government shutdown that would damage our communities, economy, and national security,” the White House said in a statement Wednesday.
When the House Oversight Committee announced its first hearing in the Biden impeachment inquiry, the White House was quick to point to the looming government shutdown.
"Staging a political stunt hearing in the waning days before they may shut down the government reveals their true priorities: To them, baseless personal attacks on President Biden are more important than preventing a government shutdown and the pain it would inflict on American families," wrote White House spokesman Ian Sams, Biden’s point man on counter-messaging against GOP investigations.
Biden has directly connected impeachment and the government shutdown himself.
“Well, I tell you what, I don’t know quite why, but they just knew they wanted to impeach me," the president told donors earlier this month during a fundraiser in McLean, Virginia. "And now, the best I can tell, they want to impeach me because they want to shut down the government.”
Biden then took a page from Clinton’s playbook, saying he was focused on the people’s business as House Republicans tried to impeach him.
“So look, look, I got a job to do," he said. "Everybody always asked about impeachment. I get up every day, not a joke, not focused on impeachment. I’ve got a job to do. I've got to deal with the issues that affect the American people every single solitary day.”
“We have important work to do — real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face,” Clinton said during his 1998 speech finally admitting his affair with Monica Lewinsky, which was at the center of his own impeachment.
There are two potential problems with Biden’s strategy, however.
One is that the electorate could find Biden’s involvement in his son’s business schemes more publicly relevant than Clinton’s sexual escapades. A recent CNN poll found that 61% thought the president was at least partially entangled in Hunter Biden’s shady schemes and 42% thought the elder Biden had acted illegally.
The second, more important flaw is that Biden may also be running a reelection strategy similar to the one that failed George H.W. Bush against Clinton: invoking aggregate economic data to try to persuade the electorate they are wrong about their perceptions of the economy.
Clinton ran against what he called the worst economy since the Great Depression, which was misleading but aligned with public attitudes. Bush kept saying the recession was over, which it technically had been since March 1991, before Clinton had even announced his presidential candidacy.
But people were still hurting from the after effects of the recession. There was a famous town hall debate moment in which a woman asked Bush about how “the deficit” affected him personally. She appeared to really mean the economy more broadly.
Bush became defensive about his personal wealth and then said something about interest rates. Clinton emoted and knocked his answer out of the park.
Biden doesn’t yet even have the luxury of arguing inflation is over. Even as it is no longer running at a 41-year high, the aftershocks endure and the cost of living remains daunting.
Voters may not feel they adequately expressed their frustration with Biden in the midterm elections, which could explain why he is starting to fall behind would-be Republican challengers.
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A government shutdown mixed with a protracted impeachment fight that inevitably ends in a Senate acquittal could certainly make Republicans look chaotic and irresponsible.
The polling, however, shows Biden doesn’t go into these battles with the same public confidence in his economic stewardship that Clinton enjoyed in the 1990s.