One Is The Loneliest Number

 

Central to the Biden image masters' message during the 2020 campaign was Joe’s common touch and five decades of Washington, D.C. experience. And while campaigns aren’t trials seeking the truth, this weekend’s unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan showed how far from reality that campaign image was.

We were sold a story of Joe from Scranton—the everyman American who rose to power but always kept those working-class roots. Fast forward to Joe the President monitoring the world from Camp David. The White House photo showed Joe by himself in an empty situation room. And even though every chair around the table had a pen and pad of paper at the ready, there wasn’t a living person in sight. Everyman Joe is now every Zoom conference Joe—which is no way to run this nation’s foreign policy. Then again, as has been pointed out by any number of observers, the clocks in the Camp David situation had the wrong time for both London and Moscow. I don’t expect any President to grasp the numerical nuance of every international time zone and the permutations of daylight savings time. I do expect, however, somebody working under the President to know how to set the clocks.

But it was the utter emptiness of the situation room that really, really disturbed me. There’s a famous photo of the White House situation room during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. There were cabinet secretaries, military brass, and all manner of advisors jammed together like the back of Spirit airlines plane. In fairness, it could have been the front of a Spirit airlines plane as well. But the image conveyed the importance of the moment—the most important people were together as a hugely daring and dangerous military action was taking place. Choose your crisis—Cuban missile, various Middle East wars, terrorist attacks—the world expects to see the President’s closest advisers contorting themselves to whisper advice into his ear. Even during the height of the Covid news conferences, President Trump had a bevy of advisors surrounding him. Yes, Trump mostly wanted to talk, and had an unnerving habit of hovering over those who were speaking, but it showed that there was a team in place working on this problem.

Not for this administration.

I’m not sure what the image masters are trying to tell us about Joe. Is this issue just not worth his time and the time of his cabinet? Is it that Joe knows this so well that all he needs is a video screen to work this all out? Or is it just that he was awake and out of his pajamas? Whatever the picture was supposed to tell us, the ensuing official statements showed how little Joe has learned during his 50 years in D.C. mixed with the subtlety of a Taliban delegation at a women’s rights conference.

The Sunday morning news shows had Joe’s cabinet blaming Trump and the Afghans. Nuance and thoughtfulness, something you should learn from 50 years in politics and government, were out, and absolution of responsibility was in. This might have been a spin game until Monday afternoon when Joe teetered into the White House and delivered remarks in person. He didn’t just repeat the blame, he doubled down, and not-so-subtly threw Obama under the bus as well. And in case there was any confusion, he adamantly claimed that this result was inevitable, it was just faster than we expected. In other words, nothing here to see.

There will be inquiries about what US intelligence knew and how they briefed the President concerning Afghanistan. There will be hearings about how the President’s cabinet and advisors helped form this current “policy.” But the last 48 hours have been about images, starting with Joe Biden staring at a video screen and ending with him shuffling from a rostrum, all by himself. And while it may be lonely at the top, it doesn’t seem that anyone wants to be around this President.

 

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.