What Biden Gets Right About the Politics of Afghanistan

Jonathan Bernstein: “President Joe Biden gave a speech on Tuesday following the final withdrawals from Afghanistan that got the most important thing right and lots of less important things… well, not quite right.”

“What he got right, as he has been doing for the last three weeks, was to frame the events in terms of a binary choice: staying or leaving. That put him on the popular side of a question — polling still suggests that a solid majority of Americans still supports ending the conflict.”

“It also put him on the right side of the media’s and the public’s attention span. The odds are strong that with the U.S. mission in Afghanistan over, and no more dramatic pictures coming from the Kabul airport, news organizations will rapidly shift to other stories, in part because most news consumers will be more interested in events at home than events abroad that don’t directly involve Americans. It’s possible that Taliban atrocities or Afghanistan-based terrorist attacks could change that, but the odds are that ‘we got out’ will soon defeat ‘but it went badly’ in the realm of public opinion.”