Rather than analyzing or remarking on Perry Bacon’s Washington Post column attributing President Biden’s low approval rating to adverse press coverage in the mainstream media, I will, as they say on Jeopardy, put it in the form of a question. Has President Biden’s press coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, CNN, and Politico been too negative?
Frankly, I’m skeptical. I’m reminded of Mme. de Cornuel’s wisecrack: “No man is a hero to his valet”. It’s less that Biden’s media coverage is excessively negative than that the coverage is excessive. IMO the days of presidential approval ratings in the 60s or higher like Eisenhower or Kennedy are long gone. 24/7 news coverage practically ensures that we know too much about presidents to think well of them.
Bacon is prominently relying on the data analysis of media coverage sentiment that Dana Milbank presented in the WaPo in December. Nate Silver wrote that it was “complete crap.”
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/nate-silver-shreds-study-dana-milbank-cited-to-claim-media-treats-biden-worse-than-trump-complete-crap/
I think Bacon was a more interesting writer for 538, often more contrarian. Maybe that’s what he’s doing here, but a simpler media data analysis would be that words like “Afghanistan” and “inflation” were rarely mentioned in the media, until they were.
Could withdrawing from Afghanistan been done better? Sure. I’m willing to cut Biden some slack on the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I don’t believe there was ever a truly good way to withdraw from Afghanistan and, if the military had had their way, we would never have withdrawn. If there’s blame it should go to Bush II, Obama, and Trump for telling the American people we were going to withdraw from Afghanistan but never finding it the right time to do it.
“Has President Biden’s press coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, CNN, and Politico been too negative?”
There are things that make one chuckle, and those that make one belly laugh. But I must admit, the in depth coverage of the smartest man Joe Biden knows, his crackhead, human trafficking and influence peddling son Hunter, and Joe’s participating and profiting from it, is probably unfair, it being all Russian disinformation and all.
You know, all that in depth coverage of Biden depravity, right? Right??
NPR and the Atlantic have been all over it………..at least when they were providing profoundly dishonest air cover……….. Yeah.
Presidents like Eisenhower and Kennedy are long gone, too. Johnson began a long line of bad emperors.
This is largely do to the primary system, which removed nominations from the control of the old machine politicians like Richard Daley and Thomas O’Neill. The machine pols were every bit as corrupt as today’s, but they made demonstrably better choices for candidates.
Well, I think Biden’ press coverage has been has been about as favorable as one could expect. Just consider how any story today would be written were Trump president with the same set of facts.
WRT Afghanistan, you had a lot of people in the media bending over backward to deflect blame onto Trump or simply asserting that a better outcome just wasn’t possible. That’s objectively BS and if Trump had presided over the fiasco of the Afghan withdrawal, the media spin would have been much different.
Same with the economy. I don’t think I’ve read a story yet that doesn’t lament that Biden is essentially the political victim for events beyond his control. Some even go so far to suggest that the current state of events has absolutely nothing to do with any Democratic policies past or present. The notion that a Republican President, much less Trump, would get similar deference is laughable. Manchin and Sinema are the evil ones in the current narrative.
But today’s media still do report and don’t ignore bad news for Democrats – it’s just that the framing is different. There’s a lot of “Republicans pounce” for example, that spins a story to one about the GoP exploiting some bad news for Democrats.
And the thing is, the right-leaning media do the same thing – and often to a much worse degree – but in reverse.
It’s really not a good time to be a consumer of US-based news media. They are all targeting relatively niche groups of very politically active and biased viewers. Even my decades-long favorite, NPR, has fallen down that hole, going from a general liberal bias to specifically catering to wealthy white progressives now.
And Dave, I disagree with you about Afghanistan. There was incontrovertible evidence the country was falling to the Taliban on a much faster timeline than was planned for. Even knowledgable open-source analysts saw it. That the US was caught unprepared is a scandal that should be investigated, but it won’t be. The military and intelligence don’t want the embarrassment, and neither does this White House. Sweep it all under the rug and the press is only too happy to oblige.
Let’s consider another way a president, any president could have handled withdrawing from Afghanistan. What would have happened if, rather than specifically ordering a withdrawal, the Pentagon had been asked for a withdrawal plan (that such a thing was not apparently already in hand is itself a scandal), giving a date certain for the delivery of the plan? Would it have made a difference or would there have been foot-dragging, excuse-making, and a covert intelligence operation to discourage a withdrawal? I’m cynical enough to think that’s what would have happened but I’m open to other possibilities.
Wow! Andy’s post was unbelievably honest and straight forward. I give him a lot of credit for writing something so non-partisan.
Dave,
I’m sure there would have been foot dragging. But the President is the Commander in Chief. It’s part of the job to not let the tail wag the dog.
And a key question is: Was the White House informed of Taliban gains and the potential for a rapid collapse of the Afghan government and security forces? If the answer is yes, then the WH deserves the blame for ignoring it. If the answer is no, then the military and intelligence community should be held to account. We don’t know the answer to that since everyone has a strong desire to shrug, claim there were no mistakes, and sweep it all under the rug.
The decision to significantly reduce US forces while at the same time cutting off support to the Afghan military, while at the same time continuing to assume that Afghanistan’s government would hold on for a year or more, is something that ought to be explained, because it doesn’t make any sense.
Another thing that ought to be explained is the complete lack of contingency planning. When the US footprint is reduced to the embassy and an undefendable postage stamp at the Kabul airport, there ought to be plans in place in case the shit hits the fan, which it did. The only thing they had ready to go was a NEO which was only possible because the Taliban played nice and became our perimeter security. It could have been a modern replay of Elphinstone’s retreat in the first Anglo-Afghan war. Even then a lot of Americans got left behind to say nothing of Afghan allies who were hunted and killed.
And that brings up the State Department slow-rolling visas for years and not significantly speeding up the process until the Taliban were literally on the outskirts of Kabul. Everyone cheered that a lot of Afghans got out who just happened to be at the Airport, most of them not vetted and many not friendly to the US. While others who risked their lives were left to die. Another thing swept under the rug with no lessons learned, no accountability, and no process improvement.
Both State and Justice have been engaging in that sort of passive aggressive BS for years (State in particular). Maybe Defense isn’t playing. I’ll have to take your word for it but I’m skeptical.
IMO it’s been obvious that was going to happen since 2001. We had done it before.
No argument here about that.
My offhand guess is that State simply didn’t have the staff to do what was needed. It was probably difficult to get the right people to go there.
Jan:
It’s no accident that the name of Andy’s blog was “Nonpartisan Blog”.
One of the great problems with the Internet is that you don’t make a lot of friends by doing objective, nonpartisan analysis.
So we are dealing with potential realities but do you really think the Afghan govt was ever going to stay when we started to pull out? I dont think so. Was it knowable that the Afghan military would then collapse so quickly? Maybe, probably but then what do you do about it? Any plan that assumes there is no Afghan support probably requires us to have a lot more military there to oversee our military leaving. Catch 22. I expected us to lose dozens of US soldiers and hundreds of Afghans. We lost 12 US lives (soldiers). Not good but better than I thought. I didnt really think the Taliban would hold to their agreements.
Agree that the Afghans should have been on an evacuation plan long ago. Of the 123,000 people evacuated IIRC over 100,000 where Afghani. Most of those should have been out long ago. I have no sympathy for most of the hundreds of Americans who got left behind since they had plenty of warning to get out. If Americans want to travel to places like Iran, Afghanistan and Russia it simply isn’t our job to bail them out.
Steve
I never thought it would. What’s more I don’t think the Bush, Obama, or Trump Administrations thought it would, either.
Dave, I was unaware Andy had a blog, let alone what he named it. Good to know….
I do not have a blog – I tried blogging many years ago but it wasn’t for me. I believe the blog was called “Nonpartisan Pundit” but I doubt it is online anymore (I can’t find it). I may have archived what I wrote there – I should look to see how cringy it was.
Dave is a very good blogger – it’s never something I could ever get the hang of.
As for my politics, nonpartisan is one way to put it. I’m actually anti-partisan, even to a fault. My blind spot is that I tend to dismiss partisans even when they are right by assuming they are just parroting their side’s talking points. So much of partisan thinking, in my view, it too wrapped up in tribal identity and affiliation, which leads, IMO, to unclear thinking.
Not that I’m necessarily any better. I have my own tribe – so to speak – it’s just outside the mainstream. I do try to focus on first principles and I tend to respect people who have principles and stick with them, even when I disagree with them or their principles. However, I think that is rare today.
I’ve never been affiliated with or given money to either political party. I’ve occasionally registered as one party or another to get access to primary voting, which was purely strategic. Here in Colorado though, unaffiliated voters can vote in either primary so that’s not a concern anymore.
Like Dave (I think) a lot of my policy preferences are ones that neither party supports. I also tend to prefer pragmatism and good and effective governance over ideology. I think it’s important to consider the opinions of people I disagree with when it comes to policy as that is essential to legitimacy. I think the problem of legitimacy, particularly with our institutions, is potentially the biggest problem facing our society. In my military and intelligence career, I’ve seen firsthand what happens when legitimacy is absent or falls apart. Humans naturally revert to tribalism and, eventually, violence. So the whole zeitgeist of “owning” the other side in the culture war and social media is something that is anathema to me, as are the calls to destroy American institutions in order to save them.
Anyway, that’s enough bloviating from me.
Steve,
“Any plan that assumes there is no Afghan support probably requires us to have a lot more military there to oversee our military leaving. ”
Yeah, exactly. It’s not a catch-22, it’s proper contingency planning. We did the opposite – we drew down forces, cut off the Afghan forces while publicly telling everyone that everything would stay stable. That’s the disconnect.
When we withdrew from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident, we sent a shit-load of forces into Somalia. We had aircraft carriers off the coast. We publicly and privately told the warlords that we would be getting out, and would be taking our people (including the people they captured and killed) and allies out with us, and that if any of them tried to fuck with us, we would kill anyone we needed too. The warlords got the message, and we got out of Somalia without being trapped on an indefensible base. That’s how you do a successful withdrawal. Yes, Somalia quickly went to shit and back to civil war, but we took care of our own and got not only our captured and dead out, but also other Americans and people who helped us. In Afghanistan, we did the opposite.
” I have no sympathy for most of the hundreds of Americans who got left behind since they had plenty of warning to get out. ”
That is really not fair. A lot of them were with NGO’s helping Afghans as part of US government-sponsored projects or as part of international aid organizations. And we kept telling them that Afghanistan wasn’t in danger of falling to the Taliban until they were almost at Kabul. These weren’t idiots like those three hikers that got picked up on the Iranian border in 2009.
So first I’d like to chime in and thank Andy for his two first comments.
Later, I would take an exception: no one ever (or only very rarely) accomplishes a thing, wins a policy position, closes a deal, secures funding etc……….without taking a strident view. Non-trivial policy positions need champions. Detached intellectualism is for staffers. “Listen, you sit over there.”
As for Afghanistan. Again, and I said it from the start. I applaud the initiative. But if you embark on something don’t step on your dick. Prepare. Like just about everything this administration has attempted, its incompetent. A ship of fools. Claiming priors would have similarly screwed up or just punted is a cheap diversionary tactic. If you are an executive, you live and die with your decisions. Scapegoating just tells the world you aren’t an executive.
Apropos of the original topic:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/394817/media-confidence-ratings-record-lows.aspx
Hey Drew,
I don’t disagree with that. Strident advocates are definitely a necessary component. But strident advocates are often wrong on the merits or misjudge situations and end up failing spectacularly.
Being a strident advocate for the wrong or stupid things isn’t something to be celebrated. And that’s really my lament – the champions for “non-trivial” policy positions are often betting on the wrong horse or are just doing/saying whatever they need to to get elected. The executive function is entirely self-serving.
No doubt that being a decision maker is a difficult job. And I agree that “if you are an executive, you live and die with your decisions” – at least in the ideal case. And in business, this is often true, but in politics, it is less true.
I’d just close with something I often repeat – the details matter. One’s grand vision and strident views don’t mean shit if it can’t be operationalized or is ignorant of incontrovertible facts. The right intentions are nothing without the ability to align the details, process, and outcomes with the vision.
I am going to disagree about comparing this to Somalia. Afghanistan has a much longer history of killing people from other countries who occupy their country. Somalia was a bunch of thugs mostly killing each other. Why we ever got involved I am still not sure. We had been fighting in Afghanistan and they knew for all of those 20 years that if they killed some of us we would try to kill them. That didnt stop them for 20 years.
Now you propose a surge (that worked so well the first time in Afghanistan) and all of a sudden they will realize that we will retaliate and kill them? I dont buy that at all. This is an honor culture. Revenge matters. There was always going to be some faction ( I dont see the Afghans as monolithic and doubt you do either) that was going to score points with some kills either for revenge or notoriety. Whether that was in Kabul or on a bus riding to Bagram in the middle of nowhere it was going to happen. I am just surprised it wasn’t worse. Putting more troops back in just meant more targets.
” A lot of them were with NGO’s helping Afghans as part of US government-sponsored projects or as part of international aid organizations. ”
A lot were also family trying to have one last extended visit. Besides, why weren’t the NGOs getting people out or why didnt they leave on their own. The evacuation was announced well ahead of time. Did they really think they were immune to problems? I would agree they weren’t as bad as the hikers or the basketball woman in Russia in most ways, but OTOH they were also people who should have known the place well.
Steve
Steve,
Temporarily plussing-up forces to do a retrograde/retreat/withdrawal operation is typically what is done. It is the norm.
We didn’t do that in this case because we made some bad assumptions, namely that the Afghan government and military forces would hold well after our departure and provide the force protection for an orderly departure, that the Taliban takeover would not be swift and would only occur after US forces were actually gone and probably many months to years after. All of which, the assumption goes, would give us time to warn Americans and get them out of the country, and finish the slow process of Visa’s for Afghan allies.
The problems with those assumptions should be obvious at this point:
– The evidence that the Afghan military and government would hold was called into question as early as May and only accelerated from there. The US government did nothing and didn’t adjust to this new reality.
– There was no contingency plan in case something went wrong, even when it became obvious that things were going wrong.
Again, we were lucky that the Taliban decided not to try to overrun Kabul airport and slaughter everyone. The fact that was left to fate and the grace of the Taliban is, incontrovertibly, a failure.
Secondly, I find it interesting you are perfectly willing to blame individuals for not understanding the unfolding danger in Afghanistan and choosing to be in the country, yet when it comes to the failure of the US government to understand the same thing, it’s a different story. As if individuals are supposed to understand what is going on in the country better than the US government.
And yes, people were there visiting their families because they wanted to do that before the US pulled out, which was supposed to happen in September. And they did that based on assurances that the country would at least be stable until that point and also based on assurances from the US government that the Afghan military and government weren’t in danger of falling quickly. That you blame the victims who were trapped there for not realizing that US government assessments were wrong while, at the same time, giving the US government the benefit of the doubt for its wrong assessments is a logic that escapes me.
I honestly don’t see how any sane person could have thought that the Afghan forces might have held after our departure if for no other reason than that Afghanistan does not have the financial capability to maintain a modern military force and never has had such capability.
Dave,
I think the question was always how long the Afghan forces would hold – I don’t know anyone who expected them to hold forever. I would have to check, but I think the US government consensus was a year or two. As we now know, they collapsed before we could even complete our withdrawal.
Another estimate I remember is that the Afghan military would return to warlordism and a repeat of Afghan civil war. And, as we now know, the Taliban cleaned house there is no significant opposition akin to the old “Norther Alliance.”
I think the assumption about the Afghan military was at least partially based upon all of the glowing descriptions from our own military about the performance of the Afghan military and how our training efforts were working so well. We believed our own propaganda. We would have had to accept that our 20 years of training was a waste to believe that the military would fall apart right away.
“That you blame the victims who were trapped there for not realizing that US government assessments were wrong while, at the same time, giving the US government the benefit of the doubt for its wrong assessments is a logic that escapes me”
Do you believe everything the government says? Anyway, I dont think you had to be a genius to realize that there was a high probability that things would not go according to plans. Staying until the last minute was always high risk.
“Temporarily plussing-up forces to do a retrograde/retreat/withdrawal operation is typically what is done. It is the norm.”
When have we ever also evacuated such a huge number of civilians at the same time we pulled out troops? In Somalia we evacuated 281 civilians. Viet Nam is the only place I can think of that comes close and while we sent a large number of ships and aircraft we were working under limitations on how many troops we could deploy. it was still a CF. So I dont think there is a norm. I think there may be doctrine (actually I am sure there is) but that needs to be applied to each unique situation. Would the Taliban have remained so passive if we surged in 5000 more troops to help with the evacuation? I doubt it but YMMV. As I said before, the idea that the Taliban would back off because we would threaten to kill them might have worked in Somalia but in Afghanistan I think they just laugh, knowing we had tried to kill them the prior 20 years and failed.
“Again, we were lucky that the Taliban decided not to try to overrun Kabul airport and slaughter everyone.”
At some level I agree with this but what I think you end up with this approach is assuming that there was fault in everything that didnt go well and only luck with the parts that did go well. Another approach is that they incorrectly assessed the Afghan military but correctly assessed the Taliban.
Steve
I believe the article is confused as to the causes of Biden’s decline.
At the time of the withdrawal, I responded to comments that Afghanistan’s political impact would blow over after a month or two (which were correct and I agreed with) with rejoinder “does Biden really want the press to stop covering Afghanistan so they could cover COVID, vaccine mandates, inflation, crime, the border, etc?”
Just note, according to RCP, at the end of August 2021, Biden had an approval of 45.8%. Today it is at 37.5%.
Its the loss of that 8% from 46% to 38% that turns this from the typical midterm blues all Presidents suffer to being a possible defining crisis of confidence in this administration.
My own view of Afghanistan as it relates to Biden’s troubles is it not the cause; but a foreshadow of what has troubled this administration. Let’s list them
(a) magical thinking (or ideological thinking) — ignoring warnings of what is happening on the ground. I pretty sure now there was extensive warnings by intelligence / OSINT as to the rapidity of Taliban gains — just as there was extensive evidence “transitory” inflation wasn’t transitory; or there was milk shortage; or that COVID had not been beaten and vaccines had certain limitations….
(b) no accountability in the administration — nobody resigned or was forced out over Afghanistan. The same is true over inflation, vaccine mandates, COVID surges, baby formula shortages, etc.
(c) distraction of much of the senior White House staff trying to achieve “legacy” legislation — some version of “Build Back Better” has sucked much of the White House’s attention since the ARP was passed.