Curry says Biden, Harris failed to explain their policy positions

By Scott Benjamin

Bill Curry, who has twice been the Democratic nominee for governor and worked two years in the Clinton White House, says, “Yes,” inflation was a principal reason that the Democrats lost the presidential election.

However, he said “it is preposterous” to blame departing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who was the party’s presidential nominee in 2024 after Biden departed the race.

“We had a global inflation in which America did considerably better than all the other developed countries,” Curry said in a phone interview with Patch.com.

“Republicans framed it as the reason for inflation,” he said. “But the [$1.9 trillion] stimulus [of March 2021] is probably the reason that we outpaced the rest of the world. We had job growth that was the envy of the world.”

However, Curry of Farmington said inflation wasn’t the factor that most stymied the Democrats’ efforts to retain the White House.

“The biggest problem, I think, was Biden, his people and his party never being able to explain anything. The arguments were never made,” he commented.

“Inflation was a problem, but ducking tough issues was a bigger problem,” Curry remarked.

“In my lifetime the single biggest source of political malpractice was Biden not giving a speech in his first week in office in which he would say, ‘I will secure your borders,’ " he declared.

“He said zero, while Trump rebuilt his career on that issue alone for two years,” said Curry.

Harris did not become the apparent nominee until July 21 upon Biden’s withdrawal. It was less than a month before the Democratic National Convention.

“He never should have started a race for re-election,” said Curry, who indicated that at least a year earlier he had started to question Biden’s mental acuity.

He said the family members and aides who “suppressed that information [on his loss of mental functions] and insulated him should be ashamed of themselves. He was having serious cognitive issues and no one spoke up. The Democratic Party looked dishonest. It made the party look incompetent.”

“Biden was an old 80,” Curry explained. “There are a lot of young 80s from Nancy Pelosi to Bernie Sanders to Mick Jagger who all have enough energy and focus to do their jobs.”

He added that despite her late entry, “Harris had enough time to win. She was a much more talented politician than I expected her to be.”

However, he said that she frequently failed to adequately address policy issues.

“Every issue she ducked, you could have provided an answer for,” Curry declared. “I’ve never seen a performance so bad on issues in a national campaign. Her campaign team had a slogan for everything and a program for nothing.”:

“They had an attitude, that people don’t listen to policy,” Curry said. “And you didn’t spend time on charges made by your opponent.”

Curry worked in a White House that produced what was then the longest economic expansion in the history of the American economy. In 1998, the Clinton Administration recorded the first balanced federal budget in 29 years, and followed that with three more budget surpluses.

In fact, among all of the former presidents the C-SPAN poll of dozens of Political Science professors, historians and journalists rated Clinton’s administration third in 2017 and fifth in 2021 in the category of Economic Management. In that most recent poll, the only presidents ahead of him in Economic Management are, in order, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt and Teddy Roosevelt.

However, in September 2001 while making his second bid for governor of Connecticut at an event in Brookfield for a candidate in the local municipal election, Curry related that President John Kennedy had said that a strong economy produces a rising tide lifting all boats.

Curry said then that the Clinton economic expansion failed to do that. Twenty-three years later he is delivering the same message.

“The blindness of the Democratic leadership to the true situation of the middle class is the reason we lost this election,” he said

Curry praised Biden for getting a massive infrastructure package approved in 2021 and approving money for investments into microchip manufacturing and electric vehicles in 2022.

“However, not one of those bills lowered people’s health care costs,” he declared. “Not one of them helped pay the rent. Not one of them raised the minimum wage.”

“None of these bills affect the daily lives of America’s middle class,” Curry remarked. “It is a middle class without disposable income. A middle class that does not have the money to repair their cars.”

He said the current plight of the working class “didn’t start with Biden or Trump or George W. Bush. It has been going on for years.”

He said Biden “never brought a minimum wage bill to the floor of the House.”

Curry commented that Democratic former President Barack Obama and Biden both campaigned on establishing a public option for health care.

“It is not Canada, England or France,” he explained. “It is a voluntary program to let small businesses and the self-employed to try to get in out of the cold.

However, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne recently applauded Biden, writing that he “changed the paradigm of economic policy from a view that prosperity stems from rewarding “job creators” at the top to what he called a “middle-out” and “bottom-up” strategy. It wasn’t just a slogan. In recent years, wage growth among low- and middle-income workers has outpaced that of higher-income groups.”

After suffering its worst performance in a national election since 1988, what does the Democrat Party have to do?

Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whom Curry worked with in the Clinton White House, recently told New York Times columnist Bret Stephens that the party should chart a more moderate path, as Clinton did, by fighting with the Democratic progressive faction in addition to the Republicans.

Emanuel said, “As I always say to the left, what part of the peace and prosperity were you most upset with?” he asks. “Which part did you hate? Was it the income growth, the employment growth, the drop in welfare rolls, the drop in crime, the fact that America was respected around the world, peace in the Middle East? Which part did you hate most?”

Added Emanuel, who also served as White House chief of staff to Obama, “I think Democrats prefer losing and being morally right to winning. Me, I’m not into moral victory speeches. I’m into winning.”

Curry said, “I’ve heard Rahm singing this song for 40 years.”

“I want a minimum wage,” he added. “You know who agrees with me? A majority of Republicans in Missouri. Everybody in America agrees, except for your billionaire donor pals, Rahm.”

“The Democratic Party was not taken over a bunch of woke English professors,” Curry exclaimed. “It was taken over by multi-national corporations and their lobbyists. It relies more on the wealthy’s money than any political party in the last 75 years.”

Resources:

Phone interview with Bill Curry, Patch.com, on Friday, December 6, 2024.

E-mail interview with Bill Curry, Pathc.com, on Wednesday, December 11, 2024.

https://www.pewresearch.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_rising_tide_lifts_all_boats

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/15/biden-legacy-progressives-economy-history/

https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2021/?category=3

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/1...