Inflation and political missteps, not bad press, are Biden’s real problems (opinion)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – The White House apparently thinks that the press is being too hard on President Joe Biden.

This is a joke, right?

Administration officials have reportedly held secret meetings with news organizations, asking them to lighten up on the president.

I guess Team Biden thought that Ol’ Joe would get a free ride after so many in the press sold their souls to gleefully collaborate in four years of Dem efforts to remove President Donald Trump from office.

But Biden is finding that merely being the anti-Trump isn’t good enough.

Blaming the press for your troubles is an age-old political tactic, right up there with blaming your predecessor in office.

Reporters are being too hard on us, political staffers will whine. They’re not looking at our successes. They only want to print bad news.

Being hard on politicians is what reporters are supposed to do. They’re not supposed to take anything at face value. They’re supposed to double-check everything.

And let’s face it: There’s been plenty of bad news for the press to focus on in the months since Biden took over.

Consumer prices jumped 6.8 percent in November, the highest level of inflation since 1982.

That’s a staggering number and it affects everything: The cost of food, gasoline, housing, cars, home heating.

And Biden can share at least some of the blame for that, with the White House pumping round after round of free stimulus checks into American households.

It’s a basic economic equation that all of us learned in school: The more money is out there, the more producers will jack up the price of goods.

It doesn’t help that pandemic-driven supply chain problems around the world have made some products scarce, also increasing costs.

A gallon of regular gasoline costs an average of $3.35 today, according to AAA.

A year ago, when Trump was still president, the average price was $2.15, according to AAA.

Americans don’t need the press to tell them how bad inflation is. They can do the math themselves every time they go to the supermarket or fill up at the pump.

Whatever the cause, inflation is Biden’s problem to deal with. That’s his job.

And that’s not all.

Biden has looked unsteady at the helm. He flubbed the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. His vaccine mandate for federal contractors is unpopular in many quarters. He hasn’t fulfilled his pledge to end the pandemic.

That’s why the president’s poll numbers are mimicking Jimmy Carter’s. Press coverage has nothing to do with it.

On the political front, Biden looks to be in a cold war with his own vice president, Kamala Harris. Her poll numbers are plummeting as well, and staffers are fleeing from what’s said to be a toxic work environment around the veep.

None of this is the fault of the media. None of this can be hidden from plain sight, no matter how compliant the press could be.

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank wrote that the press actually treats Biden worse than they treated Trump.

Is he serious, or just chasing easy internet clicks with an outlandish headline?

Where is the Biden equivalent of the utterly discredited Russia/Dem dossier, which the media gave wall-to-wall coverage to without a scrap of due diligence?

Where is the steady media drumbeat to impeach Biden?

Where is the flood of law enforcement and intelligence community leaks that rained down on Trump, leaks that were breathlessly reported as fact by the media?

And imagine if it was Donald Trump Jr.’s laptop and not Hunter Biden’s that was being talked about. Imagine if it were Eric Trump selling his “artwork” to the anonymous bidders. Or if Ivanka Trump had the business dealings in Russia and China that Hunter has had.

The media helped Joe Biden get elected. But the media can’t save his presidency. Only Biden can do that.