President Biden kicks off a national campaign Wednesday pitching his economic record to a deeply skeptical public. The challenge: Biden really has two economic records. One of them begins in late 2021 and consists of a series of legislative wins on infrastructure, semiconductor production and renewable energy, which he then preserved in a debt-ceiling deal with Republicans. These policies could shape the economy for years to come. That record, though, is overshadowed by the record of his first months in office, when his American Rescue Plan pumped $1.9 trillion of demand into a supply-constrained economy. The result was the tightest job market in memory and a surge in inflation that still hangs over Biden’s approval ratings and his prospects for re-election.

His early agenda was also not particularly novel. The Rescue Plan was old-fashioned Keynesian demand stimulus, notable mostly for its sheer size. Biden’s staff designed it with the economy of 2009 in mind...

Biden’s team is still sticking to that narrative. In a memo released this week, his political strategists Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon write that Biden “faced an immediate economic crisis when he took office” in January 2021. Actually, he didn’t. By then, the economic crisis brought on by Covid-19 was largely over, even if the health crisis wasn’t.

The American Rescue Plan, in other words, was designed to bolster demand in an economy that already had plenty. Dunn and Donilon’s memo boasts that job creation under Biden has been the strongest of any president going back at least to Ronald Reagan. Much of that reflected recovery from the pandemic, which would have happened under any president.

Inflation is the main reason voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy by a two-to-one ratio, according to a May poll by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. If inflation doesn’t fade of its own accord, the Federal Reserve might have to raise interest rates further and push the economy into recession, which won’t help Biden’s approval ratings.

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