Gerald Ford has been popping up on social media. The former president died in 2006, but he’s having a moment because of his “Whip Inflation Now” campaign in the 1970s. When Richard Nixon resigned and Vice President Ford stepped up in 1974, inflation was 11%.

Ford’s anti-inflation campaign—famously memorialized on red “WIN” label buttons—was a voluntary plea for American consumers to buy less and save more. It was so simplistic Ford’s economic advisers, including Alan Greenspan, found it deeply embarrassing, and it became one of the biggest flops of Ford’s short presidency. A few years after he lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976, inflation crested at 15%.

Economy geeks are revisiting Ford’s feckless WIN campaign because President Biden is now in a similar jam. Inflation hit 7.5% in January, led by the soaring cost of cars, home heating, gasoline, food and housing. This is not incidental inflation. It’s the everyday stuff people have to buy, and it’s hammering household budgets. Wages are only up by 5.7%, so typical workers are falling behind. This is political peril for any president.

Biden has a plan. But the lesson from Ford is that presidents don’t have much power, on their own, to combat inflation. The Federal Reserve certainly does, and the Fed under chair Jerome Powell now seems certain to start hiking interest rates and tightening other monetary levers as early as March. Fed tightening takes time, however, and inflation might not drop by enough to help Biden and his fellow Democrats in the November midterm elections. Fed rate hikes can also cause recessions, if they go too far or a recession seems necessary to corral really nasty inflation, as in the early 1980s.

So Biden needs to show some sort of action instead of simply waiting for the Fed, which he doesn’t control anyway. On Feb. 10, the Biden White House published its plan to “lower costs for working families.” Here are the main elements, with some commentary:

Fix supply chains and boost domestic manufacturing. Necessary and good. Supply chain disruptions and ensuing shortages are one cause of inflation. But this is largely a private-sector problem and there’s not much the president can do. More domestic manufacturing would probably be good for workers, but it’s not likely to drive prices down. If anything, goods made in America are more expensive, not less, than imports from China and other lower-cost countries.

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Promoting competition. Also good, but come on. It’s exceedingly difficult to break up conglomerates that have monopoly pricing power, and this is something the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are supposed to do on an ongoing basis, anyway, through antitrust enforcement. One example the White House gives is a new plan to allow the sale of hearing aids without a prescription, at sharply lower prices. This is the implementation of a law Congress passed five years ago, and industry groups, such as audiologists, oppose it. Maybe it will go into effect this year. Maybe not. If it does, hearing-impaired people will benefit, but it will have a trifling effect on overall inflation.