Why Are Biden’s Poll Numbers So Low? This Doesn’t Help

You never get a second chance to make a first impression

So, why are President Biden’s poll numbers so low? After all, unemployment is low, average wages are up, the stock market is doing well, the GDP had it’s best one year growth in Biden’s first year than any time since Noah took up sailing. Life is returning to normal after a two year Covid war. Yet the new NBC News poll has Biden’s job approval rating at a miserable 40%.

Part of it is timing and circumstances. For instance,  in the poll, Biden is finally above water again in his handling of Covid at 51%. That’s because life is finally returning to normal after the long, dark night. But at the same time, only 3% of poll respondents show Covid as their top issue, So Biden isn’t getting the bang for his buck that he deserves for his handling the crisis, people are getting over it.

The top issue for people is gas prices and inflation. Granted, there isn’t a helluva lot a President can do about inflation, especially when the previous Dickhead in Chief left him no cards to deal from. But while Americans are still willing to pay more at the pump to aid Ukraine, they are also separating the issues. While they back the US embargo on Russian oil and natural gas, and will pay more at the pump, at least for a while, they also fail to see what an embargo on Russian oil has to do with the higher cost of eggs, milk, meat, diapers and toilet paper at the supermarket. And that they do hold Biden responsible for, right or wrong.

But earlier today on MSNBC, an analyst said something regarding Biden’s low polling numbers that just struck home with me. I’ll repeat what I said at the top. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. When Biden was sworn in in January of 2021, by my estimate he had a honeymoon cruise about twice as long as the average President. People were thrilled with a return of normalcy and competence to the government. His vaccine rollout was smooth and wildly successful. He got a Covid relief package through that got money in people’s pockets, and kept small businesses from going under during the worst of the pandemic. What wasn’t to like?

But then came July-August of 2021. In running for President, Biden campaigned that he would follow Trump’s agreement with the Taliban, and withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan, bringing our longest war to a close. And as President, he resisted rising pressure to leave troops in there, and completed the withdrawal he had promised.

But it turned out to be a Faustian nightmare. The Afghan military and government collapsed months before US military and intelligence estimates said they would. This allowed the Taliban to overrun both the country as well as the capital of Kabul in the middle of the withdrawal, making an orderly withdrawal basically impossible.

Nobody can forget the images. The entrance to the Kabul airport looking like a grunge band mosh pit as desperate Afghans tried to get out. The loss of 17 marines in a suicide bombing at an airport gate, trying to assist Afghans to enter days before the end of the withdrawal. And anybody who saw it will ever forget the images of hundreds of screaming Afghans running down the ramp of Kabul airport, grabbing onto the struts, flaps and landing gear of the military transport, seeking an out, only to fall to their deaths after the aircraft took off.

There are three words for it. A failure of leadership. After all, how could a plan that had more than 6 months to be formulated and planned fail so miserably? To independent and soft Biden voters, the debacle could easily shake their confidence in the administration’s ability to handle a crisis. And right now, there’s at least partial empirical polling evidence to support that thesis. Biden has performed flawlessly in the Ukraine crisis, yet in the NBC poll, only a minority of Americans trust Biden to navigate the Ukraine crisis successfully.

Now look, before you rip me a new one in the comments, let me make this clear. I was with Biden then, and I’m with him now! Biden was right. After Bush’s misguided invasion of Afghanistan without the will to carry it through, it was long past time to bring this to an end. But Biden was the only one of three succeeding Presidents to show the resolve to get it done. And he deserves full marks for his efforts.

As I said above, a good part of it comes down to timing and circumstances. If the Taliban hadn’t been able to negotiate with individual Afghan units, and convince them of the logic of laying down their arms rather than fighting while their overlords were running away, there could have been a very different ending to this. But it wasn’t to be. But that doesn’t mean that Biden was wrong, he wasn’t. But politically, it has wounded him.

Most talking heads are slobbering all over themselves to talk about how much more difficult this makes the 2022 electoral map. And it may or may not be true. After all, the axiom is that A week is a lifetime in politics. But there’s another axion in politics, Memories are long in politics. And even without the GOP hammering at the Afghan debacle, plenty of people have already had their opinion of Biden soured.

This theory helps to explain the fact that none of almost a half a dozen White House messing restarts have had any effect. The White House has tried restarting the imaging of everything from unemployment to Covid, inflation to gas prices to the economy, and nothing has moved the needle. Maybe because, at least in part, those things weren’t the thing that people were thinking about. Maybe their vision was clouded by the Afghan withdrawal.

But there’s a possible silver lining in this oh, so dark cloud. And here it is. According to the polling I’ve seen with my wimpy eyes, apparently also seen by MSNBC and CNN, all may not be lost in 2022. According to recent polling, many if not most Democratic incumbents in both the House and the Senate are running far ahead of Biden. This is not exactly anything new. In 2006, Bush Lite was about as popular as genital lice. As a result, rather than hitting the road to campaign with GOP candidates, Bush left Air Force 1 at Andrews, and let his candidates run their own races without his taint. While there may be some places in Pennsylvania and Ohio where Biden is a popular draw, I think we’ll see the same thing here. Don’t touch that dial.