The chances are that most voters do not know where Joe Biden’s secretary of defense is at any given moment. The public is likely to assume that the president, his subordinates, their staffs, and the watchdogs in media whose job it is to chronicle government officials’ activities are on top of it, if only because that was a reasonably safe assumption up until this week. What is likely to bite Biden — if Lloyd Austin’s reckless vanishing act bites the president at all — is the epiphany dawning on voters that no one in the administration was on top of it. And when those voters begin to think about it a little more, they might conclude that Biden hasn’t been on top of very much.
Biden’s presidency is buffeted by events, flitting directionless from one crisis to the next without having much of an impact on the trajectory of any one of them. Austin’s disappearance occurred amid an ongoing national humiliation abroad. No one, administration officials included, denies that Iran is behind the many dozens of attacks on U.S. service personnel in Iraq and Syria. Nor do they quibble about who is pulling the strings in Yemen, where a ragtag rebel group has partially closed crucial Red Sea shipping lanes to commercial traffic.
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