Joe Biden’s slot machine

Will gas prices topple President Biden?

The French demanded bread. The queen is supposed to have told them to eat cake. The king’s head thudded into the basket below the guillotine. Tea chests splashed into Boston Harbor. In 2007, Mexicans rioted over the price of corn used to make tortillas.

The president of the United States of America is capitalism’s innocent bystander. He (and it’s always a he) watches as the price of automobile gasoline or home heating oil goes up or down, and he hopes the peasants will not take to the ballot box. Compared to the power of a multinational oil company, the president has very little power, and he cannot buy senators nearly so recklessly.

The American population is a one-eyed beast, which means it can only watch one thing at a time. Right now, it’s watching prices at the pump. This isn’t as stupid as it seems. Gas gets you to work, where you make the money you need to buy food. That’s no small thing.

And, like the ownership of a gun, the ownership of a car is one of the last vestiges of the old, American free life. We are Americans. We are mobile, and we are armed, and our mothers can drive us to another state to kill people.

There are people who insist that Biden is deliberately raising the price of gasoline to “destroy our country.” In other words, we riot for gas, and Biden says, “Let ’em drive electric cars.”

Still, I’ve lived three quarters of a lifetime, and over those six decades, gas prices have only gone up. They have gone down for short (very short) periods of time, but the general direction, like the price of cigarettes, has been upward.

Biden must remember days when everything could be bought even more cheaply, when no president really had to watch the price of gasoline, when the numbers at the pump might not be the face of the slot machine that determines his fate.

Those gas price numbers at the pump may turn out to be the most important poll taken about the Biden presidency.

An entire social agenda, an entire theory of government, great castles of thought about sex and race and fairness, all of it rides on the numbers spinning at the pump.

And Biden is losing

Dion’s latest book, a high-mileage collection of his best columns, is called “Devil’s Elbow, Dancing in the Ashes of America.” It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.