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On Wednesday, President Joe Biden was interviewed by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. Read the full transcript here. ABC News
“President Biden’s approval rating has fallen to 49.3 percent in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls, the first time Biden has dipped below a 50 percent approval rating since entering office.” The Hill, FiveThirtyEight
The right argues that Afghanistan will harm Biden’s domestic agenda.
“For a man who promised a restoration of American unity after years of intense political conflict, Biden has achieved this goal: Everyone now thinks he failed. No matter your feelings about Afghanistan — whether you thought we should get out now, or 10 years ago, or never — Americans all agree this exit is a debacle, an embarrassment of logistical planning that has left our fellow citizens and our allies in the lurch…
“The media depicted Joe Biden as an American comeback — that the arc of history, having been momentarily disrupted by a populist brigand in Donald Trump, would now return to its proper state. But a problem has emerged in this narrative, and that problem is Joe Biden. He is not the leader that was promised…
“His version of normalcy — chaos at the southern border, inflation hitting every household, a return to mandates and lockdowns, massive debt spending, and an anti-American education system run amok — hurts your average working American. And every smart Democratic operative can see the tidal wave heading their way because of it.”
Ben Domenech, New York Post
“As the pandemic faded into the background with the rise in vaccinations, many American voters started to think about other things. They saw high inflation and an administration focused more on pushing an unprecedented expansion of federal government power than on economic recovery. The gross incompetence on display now will only add to the sense that the administration is out of touch and out of control… Biden’s coalition was always more anti-Trump than pro-Democratic. His declining job approval ratings are a sign of that. The Democratic dilemma won’t go away soon no matter what happens in Afghanistan.”
Henry Olsen, Washington Post
“After making no public appearances for four days — during a major foreign crisis — President Biden read a 20-minute speech off a teleprompter on Monday afternoon and took no questions. He immediately returned to Camp David. He had no events on his schedule Tuesday. On Wednesday, he gave another 20-minute speech about vaccine boosters off a teleprompter from Camp David, and again took no questions. Also on Wednesday, the president sat for an on-camera interview with George Stephanopoulos that did not go well. According to the White House public records, Biden has had two phone conversations with foreign leaders in the past ten days…
“This is a highly unusual schedule for a president during a foreign-policy crisis… The obvious answer to why Biden rarely appears on camera or takes questions is because every time he does it, he inflicts more damage upon himself and his agenda. The president whose empathy is endlessly touted now sounds cold and dismissive when asked about Afghans’ desperately crowding into American planes or falling to their deaths…
“All of the available evidence indicates that the president ignored the warnings of his foreign-policy team, withdrew the armed forces before evacuating the civilians, gave up Bagram Air Base, and now is in a large-scale foreign crisis that is mostly the result of his own choices. There is no good defense to be made.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“At the moment, the White House strategy appears to be to hunker down and hope all of the bad images from Kabul go away. Perhaps that could have worked before the era of the smart phone, but technology — even in Afghanistan — pretty much guarantees that the bad images will never go away, and likely will never stop coming. The abandonment of Afghan allies is a stain that will never wash, and a stink on Biden and his administration that will never entirely fade. Even his fellow Democrats are getting repelled by the stench.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
Some, however, wonder, “Will the denouement of the Afghan war ‘stain’ Biden’s presidency for ever, as many pundits confidently assert? It’s too soon to judge. The latest polls show his ‘job approval’ rating is suffering. But in the longer-term, it’s possible he will experience a popularity boost…
“Maybe Biden has absorbed a key political lesson of the Trump years. It’s not that he’s succumbed to ‘America First’ isolationism, as so many are now saying. It’s that, by remaining uncowed in the face of media outrage, he’s been able to present himself as a man who stands for something, even if in reality he doesn’t. Trump understood that people increasingly hate elite pundits more than they despise elected leaders. He proved over and over that by triggering the noisy apoplexy of the ‘laptop class’, a politician can attract voters who are not as addicted to social media and rolling-news cycles. Biden may have just pulled off the same trick.”
Freddy Gray, Spectator World
The left sees Afghanistan as a setback for Biden, and urges him to course correct and continue focusing on his domestic agenda.
The left sees Afghanistan as a setback for Biden, and urges him to course correct and continue focusing on his domestic agenda.
“Only after Biden’s speech on Monday did [the] reality fully settle in at the White House. First, Biden authorized $500 million to support more visa applicants and other Afghans, such as interpreters, who’d helped American forces…
“Then aides girded for the kind of predictable but grim Washington blame game they once thought they could avoid: military officials blaming the State Department for not being prepared for chaos in Kabul; diplomats pointing at executive-office dithering over how to extract Americans; strategists wondering aloud about the quality of the intelligence on the Taliban’s strength; and the intelligence community inevitably leaking its top-line findings. ‘Contradicting Biden, Reports Warned of Rapid Collapse,’ blared the New York Times’ front page on Wednesday…
“‘Their calculation’ — that Americans support withdrawal, no matter what the John Boltons of the world say on TV — ‘was correct,’ one senior Senate Democratic aide close to the administration told me after Biden addressed the nation. ‘But once you’ve got images of people clinging to wheels of C-17s and falling to their deaths, that will linger.’”
Gabriel Debenedetti, New York Magazine
“George Stephanopoulos asked Biden on Wednesday, ‘When you look at what’s happened over the last week, was it a failure of intelligence, planning, execution, or judgment?’ That’s a straightforward question that the American people are surely wondering, and it deserved a more straightforward answer than the one Biden delivered…
“Some of the best reporters in America are boring in right now, trying to find out whether the real breakdown here happened at the Pentagon, the State Department, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, or the West Wing. If the answer turns out to be the West Wing, in whole or in part, that’s on Biden. He ought to switch rhetorical gears and start owning up to the errors that were made…
“There’s still time to salvage the situation and clean up this unholy mess. But Biden’s personal credibility rests on the two pillars of his honesty and his decency. He’s in trouble if he loses one or both of those.”
Michael Tomasky, New Republic
“In 1964, Lyndon Johnson and his fellow Democrats secured crushing majorities that enabled them to enact a flurry of landmark legislation: the Voting Rights Act, the bill establishing Medicare and Medicaid, an overhaul of immigration law. It is a feat Mr. Biden and progressive Democrats in Congress today would dearly like to emulate…
“But Johnson’s decision early in 1965 to send thousands of troops to combat the Vietcong soon halted the momentum of his Great Society agenda and put Democrats on the defensive. A year later, as the war dragged on and protests mounted, Johnson’s approval rating dipped below 50 percent. In the midterm contests of 1966, the Republican Party picked up 47 seats in the House… Two lessons from Johnson’s downfall are paramount…
“First, tell the truth, even if it makes you look bad, temporarily… [Biden] should give a fuller explanation of why his administration failed to prepare for a Taliban victory that, according to years of intelligence reports, was quite likely… Second, keep the coalition that elected you united in its response to the crisis… If he chooses to declassify whatever vital documents exist, in an attempt to convince his Democratic critics that he is serious about revealing why his exit strategy went wrong, it may dissuade them from engaging in their own lengthy investigation.”
Michael Kazin, New York Times
“Biden can't afford to lose credibility with a pandemic response in full swing. And he needs to command political authority in galvanizing his own party members to pass crucial infrastructure legislation…
“If Democrats vote along party lines, the [$1 trillion] bipartisan infrastructure bill that cleared the Senate should become law. But the $3.5 trillion version, which is larded with sweeping Biden economic proposals as well as important climate-change provisions, will require nearly every moderate Democrat in the House and then in the Senate to vote in favor…
“After what has happened in Afghanistan, being a loyal ‘Biden Democrat’ may be tougher for moderates in the Senate and the House who must answer to constituents in swing districts and states. Biden has suffered a self-inflicted political wound in Afghanistan. And the last thing the nation needs, when it comes to COVID-19, climate change and crumbling American infrastructure, is for that wound to bleed into his efficacy on domestic issues.”
Editorial Board, USA Today
