President Biden’s inflation speech on Tuesday gives him another chance to grow in office. It’s no longer enough to quote President Truman in the opening line and spend the rest of the speech passing the buck down Pennsylvania Avenue.“Biden Calls Out Republicans to Help Fight Inflation,” the Hill reported last weekend, quoting the president as saying, “I encourage congressional Republicans to join us in our efforts….” Does he really think Republicans want their fingerprints on his crisis?Supporting the $5 trillion Build Back Better — which Mr. Biden promises will cure all our ills from the economy to rainy days and Mondays — would mean more of the spending and energy policies that Republicans see as the root cause of record inflation. To do so would be political malpractice and a betrayal of their voters.When the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, agreed to help raise the debt ceiling last October rather than force Democrats to do it alone, Senator Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, reacted with glee, claiming “McConnell caved.”Headline writers agreed, blaring, “McConnell Blinked.” President Trump dubbed him, “Folding Mitch McConnell” for the “terrible deal,” and Senator Graham, speaking for the GOP caucus, called it a “complete capitulation.”Besides, it’s Democrats who stand in the way of Build Back Better. Senators Manchin of West Virginia and Sinema of Arizona agree that Mr. Biden trying to spend away inflation is like Steve McQueen trying to firebomb his way out of the Towering Inferno.Although Mr. Biden has always found attacking Republicans as comfortable as an old pair of slippers, the inconvenient truth is that it’s the opposite position that enjoys bipartisan support from the American people. Sure, Republicans have the Senate filibuster, but even when Democrats had 60 votes in early 2009, Mr. Biden blamed them for standing in the way of the utopia he claimed he’d deliver if only they rubber-stamped his plans.In the second presidential debate of 2020, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Biden why he hadn’t gotten through promised prescription drug legislation while vice president. The reply: “We had a Republican Congress. That’s the answer.”No, it wasn’t. Republicans didn’t control either house in Obama-Biden’s first two years. In fact, Democrats enjoyed a majority in the House and a 60-vote, filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate. Mr. Trump failed to call out his challenger, though his follow-up made sense: “You gotta talk ’em into it, Joe. Sometimes you gotta talk ’em into it.” This was, after all, the man who promised to bring together Republicans and Democrats.And Mr. Biden may even have meant it — right up until his hand came off the Bible on Inauguration Day. Five months later, only after the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, asked why the president hadn’t bothered to talk to him, did Mr. Biden remember he existed.At the time, the White House was clinging to the narrative that inflation was “transitory” and would work itself out, so there was no need for Republican input. Later, the administration tried to blame the rising prices on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and again the GOP was sidelined.Only now, with inflation at its highest level in 41 years, has the president decided to fall back into the partisan blame game, forgetting — as Bill Clinton said in his 1996 debate with Senator Dole — that “no attack ever fed a hungry child.”Every presidential speech is a chance to shift the public mood, to rise to the occasion, to grow in office the way Vice President Arthur — a product of the Gilded Age Republican machine — did after the assassination of President Garfield.Seeking a lucrative patronage post, Senator Roscoe P. Conkling, the New York Republican who finagled Arthur onto Garfield’s ticket, came up empty. “He’s not ‘Chet’ anymore,” Conkling said, using Arthur’s nickname. “He’s the president of the United States.” When Mr. Biden speaks about inflation, the American people deserve to hear their president, not a politician.
