We are seeing the pent-up frustration with a politician it has never had much confidence or faith in.
We are seeing the pent-up frustration with a politician it has never had much confidence or faith in.
T here are countless stories that will come out of the Afghan tragedy. But one of the more surprising is the extent to which liberal media outlets and the foreign-policy establishment have turned on President Joe Biden.
It’s certainly true that both groups didn’t do enough to question the wisdom of expending thousands of lives and trillions in treasure pursuing “nation-building” in Afghanistan after the Taliban were initially defeated post-9/11. But their prior investment in that position doesn’t fully explain the visceral and swift way in which they’ve attacked Biden and his aides for the moral and logistical nightmare of the U.S. withdrawal.
What I think we are seeing in part is pent-up frustration with a Joe Biden whom the Beltway establishment has never had much confidence or faith in.
Robert Gates, former defense secretary under Obama, famously said in his 2014 memoir that Biden has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and secretary of defense under President Clinton, says Biden’s decision to withdraw was rooted in the sad fact that Biden “didn’t really spend much time on the issue” and that the Biden administration was simply “crossing their fingers and hoping chaos would not result.”
Ryan Crocker, the former ambassador to Afghanistan under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, says Biden made more than just an egregious policy mistake: “I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander in chief.”
Even officials in his own administration are pointing reporters to a 2019 Biden interview in the Wall Street Journal in which the then–presidential candidate criticized President Trump for withdrawing the last U.S forces from Syria. Biden told the Journal that “when we leave a vacuum, like he’s leaving it, it creates significant opportunities for difficulty.”
Indeed, it is remarkable that officials in the once nearly leak-proof Biden administration are making their displeasure known. Tucker Carlson noted on his Fox News show that “some of Biden’s most senior appointees are contradicting him in public. If you cover politics, it’s shocking to see that. This is a violation of the first and most ruthlessly enforced rule in any White House: Don’t diminish the boss.”
What is going on here? No one knows for sure, but one explanation I’ve been told several times is that media figures and the establishment sources who leak to them are boiling over with frustration at how much Biden has disappointed them.
Biden came from way behind to win the Democratic nomination in early 2020 largely owing to the onset of COVID and the primal fear Democrats had that socialist Bernie Sanders would lose to Donald Trump. Both groups latched on to Biden as a life preserver that kept afloat their hope to defeat Trump. They cosseted him, they covered for him, they pampered him incessantly, they excused his clearly slipping energy and coherence. They went to extraordinary lengths, including censorship, to protect him from stories such as the one over Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Despite all of their efforts, now Biden has insisted on embarrassing them. Make no mistake, there is a genuine collapse of confidence in Biden. They may kiss and make up because Democratic control of Congress is at stake in 2022, but the wounds felt by the establishment from Biden’s incompetence will remain.
They may even manifest themselves in questions about just how up to the job Biden is. During the 2020 campaign, Biden certainly thought the issue was fair game when directed at his rival. President Trump was well known for his meandering monologues, short attention span, and failure to listen. For Biden, that represented a basic issue of competence: He said Trump “doesn’t seem cognitively aware of what’s going on. He either reads and/or gets briefed on important issues and he forgets it, or he doesn’t think it’s necessary that he needs to know it.”
For his part, Trump frequently referred to Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” a figure who wasn’t up to the job. In August 2020, Biden had had enough. During an ABC interview, he said, “Watch me, Mr. President,” as he gestured on camera for Trump to approach him. He urged voters to look at him and running-mate Kamala Harris and see “what kind of shape we’re in.”
Well, we’ve been watching Biden in office for seven months now, and the reports aren’t reassuring. Michael McKenna, a Washington Times columnist, says the president’s daily schedule seems to have been sparse indeed.
“There are seldom two meetings on the presidential schedule, and there have only been a handful of trips to places other than Delaware,” he notes. “Announcements of the closure of the news-making portion of the day (“lids”) have been called as early as 11 a.m. During and after the fall of Kabul, the president was at Camp David, apparently by himself.” As for media exposure, he notes Biden has given less than ten in-person on-camera interviews, compared with the 50 that Trump and the 110 that President Obama, his former boss, had conducted by this point in their presidencies.
McKenna may well be a biased observer, having served as deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs in the Trump White House. But he is a serious student of the presidency and says that “this leadership, or lack thereof, and its tempo dates back to the campaign and is exceedingly unusual for a sitting president.”
It is curious that the Big Kahuna of the Democratic establishment, Barack Obama, has been silent about all aspects of how his former vice president has handled Afghanistan. Obama and Biden have always had a fraught relationship. Obama aides would often make disparaging comments about Biden’s internal advice, such as his opposition to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national-security adviser, wrote in his memoir that “in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.”
Obama also frustrated Biden by applying pressure on him not to run for president in 2016. Biden himself recalled that in a private meeting “the president was not encouraging.” Biden finally chose not to run in 2016 after Obama made it crystal clear he favored Hillary Clinton. Biden’s decision came at the last minute, after consulting with Obama. Biden had already scouted out office space and sounded out people to work on his campaign.
Obama wasn’t high on Biden’s strengths. Politico reported that “one Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, ‘Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.’” During the 2020 campaign, Obama told one 2020 candidate: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”
The question that Biden’s media allies and the Washington establishment are now privately wondering: Is the Afghan disaster an aberration, or will the calculated risk they took in helping Biden into the White House prove to be an unending series of headaches and embarrassments?