Whatever happens in the fall, one of the clearest stories of Biden's first term was that he was a broadly popular president who bit a huge bullet in ending the biggest of the Forever Wars, got destroyed for it in the press and popular imagination, and never recovered.
If there are political science textbooks in 50 years, pulling out of Afghanistan (which, to be clear, was a good and much-belated thing) will be one of the go-to examples of the distance between what voters say they want and what they actually want
I agree mostly with this but in your first tweet you say how he got pilloried in the press. Wouldn't that affect voters' views on something they said they wanted?
especially since the story was basically "Joe Biden left Afghanistan incompetently" like there was some way to leave the country under the conditions Trump had set that wasn't going to be a disaster.
The sick irony, it was Dubya's damned boondoggle. He made post 9/11 about nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq and that ignorant war criminal learned NOTHING from history and has a fundamental misunderstanding of the Middle East. His incompetence cost the lives of thousands and trillions in debt.
And by all historical standards, it went incredibly well! Compare it to the absolute muckshow that was the brutal two-year withdrawal from Vietnam, for example...
I'm convinced the absurdly negative news coverage shaped public opinion on this, in great part.
People universally say they want a leader, not a follower, for President. Someone who sees clearly and steers the right course even if it's unpopular in the moment.
People said that when asked about their support for Bush Jr, for example.
People lie /all the damn time/.
We’re like the stubborn old man who’d rather suffer through the daily low grade misery of an arthritic hip rather than suck it up get it replaced and do the rehab.
I sure hope textbooks accurately portray the departure as the noose it was, as Trump negotiated the end with the Taliban and left the evacuation to an incoming Biden admin, ensuring it was going to be a disaster, which it was.
There's a very long history of Western interference in Afghanistan going back to (British) colonial times & it's well known to never end well. We never learn.
Biden getting hung out to dry on Afghanistan really sucks. Him getting beat up for inflation in the middle of one of the strongest economic recoveries ever sucks too. The lessons learned if he loses are beyond bleak for any left-ish policy hope
the worst part of the inflation reporting is the refusal to report that the rest of the damn world was suffering from the same shit because it was supply chain bullshit not specific policy choices.
Not just the same shit, but the same shit only _worse_
Yeah, our inflation was high, but every other economy's inflation rate was significantly higher. It sucked for _everyone_ because of the state of the world, and we sucked the least. That should be sold as a win. Instead they hid from it.
The policy turnstile since B. Clinton's administration really shuts down any faith one might want to have that voters will notice and reward good performance in office. The reward Democrats get for making good policy is being shown the door in favor of idiots and assholes.
We’ll also never see any government policy that prioritizes full employment again, since even the briefest of periods of high inflation has been treated as a catastrophe.
We had dinner with a international economics professor friend who is Peruvian who told us his students believed we were experiencing hyperinflation. Peru’s inflation in the late 80s was over 7,000%
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it’s scary that it seems the only people who know anything about Weimar Germany are neo-Nazis who want to “solve” what they see as Weimar America.
Anyone who lived through the 2008 economic crisis can tell you that this is nothing compared to the econimic catastophe made worse by political forces pushing austerity policies.
Every person who wants a job having one. It's borderline impossible of course because of structural reasons. But with that said, no government policy has ever sought to achieve it.
I think most people are using the economics definition which attempts to take into account those structural factors.
There have been a few governments that have attempted full employment via government as ELR, which certainly feels like seeking it to me, but I’m not sure of their success rate.
I’m not doing this to blame the left, I swear, but we really dropped the ball on having his back on it too. Like a huge policy win that we (myself included) just kind of moved on from
He was sinking from day 1 because he promised us an inadequate $2000 and gave even less. Then the delta wave showed that his vaccine-only approach wouldn't work. Then inflation went crazy.
The pullout hurt him for sure, but he was already failing to meet the moment.
It's possible that inflation represented a second shock to his favorability and that absent it he'd have recovered. But the Afghanistan withdrawal was absolutely the inflection point for his polling.
Paid Family Leave, Child Tax Credit, expanded Medicare, broad (not targeted) student debt relief, instead of the forgettable bipartisan bill signing ceremony he chucked it all away for in fall 2021 would have done him lots of good. Not to mention Gaza.
I wonder about this too-all the people I know who give me bellweather reports--they never cared about this AT ALL. But maybe it causes the media to turn on him.
