Biden was wrong to say that he would do “nothing” differently after the midterms, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) told Fox News on Thursday.
At his first post-midterm press conference on Wednesday, President Joe Biden was asked what he would do differently to change people’s opinion that the country was heading in the wrong direction. Biden replied, “Nothing.” He said it was a voter education issue: “The more they know about what we’re doing, the more support there is.”
“I think that the problem is the major piece of legislation we passed—some of the bipartisan—takes time to be recognized,” Biden added.
Slotkin disagreed. “I’m not sure that straight nothing was the answer I would have given,” she said. “But, if the midterms are a referendum on how the president is doing, or at least that’s common wisdom, we certainly had a different result than we were expecting across the country.”
The congresswoman who just won reelection in Michigan’s newly configured 7th Congressional District suggested an inflation task force or a process at the beginning of every briefing to demonstrate the government’s focus on addressing inflation, adding, “figuring out how we address inflation has got to be one issue.”
At the same press conference, Biden also said: “We are not anywhere near a recession right now in terms of the growth, but I think we can have what most economists call a soft landing.”
Slotkin ran her reelection campaign on affordable health care, drug costs, and investment in public school education. She belongs to a group of moderate Democrat congressmembers with a national security background who first took office in 2018.
She said her campaign took a “practical, reasonable Midwestern approach” and that more moderate candidates did better in Michigan. This state voted for former President Donald Trump in 2016.
“I think at this point, people are just looking for someone who plays in the center, and as a pragmatist, they don’t like the extremes on either side of the aisle,” Slotkin added. “And I think that’s what we’re starting to see in Michigan is often a bellwether of trends to come in the rest of the country.”
Department of Labor’s consumer-price index, which measures how much urban consumers pay for goods and services, has been increasing at a steady month-over-month pace of 0.4 percent in the past two months.
CPI also showed a 7.7 percent year-over-year increase in October, according to the inflation data released on Thursday. That slightly decreased from 8.2 percent in September to 9.1 in June, the highest in four decades.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.
