Biden’s victories look a lot like defeats

Joe Biden’s week did not get off to a good start. When running for office in 2020 he repeatedly boasted that he was going to ‘shut down the virus’, not the country. And then in the space of a few days last week it looked as if he had managed to achieve his promise, just the opposite way around. The President appears to have shut down the economy while suffering from the virus.

Despite being endlessly vaccinated, the President recently tested positive for Covid. And then last week he tested positive again. So he had a double dose. At the same time America had a double dose of something else: negative GDP growth. People started talking about the ‘R’ word: recession. Until recently two successive quarters of negative GDP growth was a common enough definition of an economy in recession.

But Biden and his team did not wish to make that concession.