Who Should Get To ‘Finish The Job’? The Answer Was Clear Before The Debate

Aside from repeatedly calling Donald Trump a liar, the only message President Joe Biden managed to convey during last week’s debate was that Trump left him a terrible mess to clean up.

The first words out of his mouth in the debate were: “You have to take a look at what I was left when I became president, what Mr. Trump left me. We had an economy that was in freefall.”

And his closing remarks began: “We’ve made significant progress from the debacle that was left by President Trump in his – in his last term.”

It’s clear why Biden’s debate prep team wanted those to be the first thing he said — before he wandered off into a maze of half-completed sentences. The Biden administration has seen the polls. It knows that the public doesn’t view things this way.

CBS News, for example, reported recently that: “Voters recall the economy under Trump more fondly than they rate the economy now. While neither gets great marks, voters today look back on Trump’s presidency with relatively better retrospective ratings than they’d rate Mr. Biden’s presidency so far.”

So who’s right? Whose policies did a better job of spurring growth, raising wages, keeping the country safe?

There is, thankfully, an objective way to answer this. Compare where things stood at comparable points in each presidency to see who was doing a better job – and whose policies are worth pursuing over the next four years.