CHAPTER 6Focus on Leadership, Not Optics
Madame Speaker, Madame Vice President…
No president has ever said those words and it's about time.
—Joe Biden
Heading into Labor Day 2021, President Biden was staring down the barrel of several crises all at once. Hurricane Ida, a resurgent Covid-19, and the chaotic exit from Afghanistan were all garnering great media attention. The crisis garnering the most was the marred departure from Afghanistan.
Biden was sharply criticized by most reporters, commentators, Republicans, many Democrats, and allies across the Atlantic and beyond. Yet Biden did not own the war in Afghanistan. Biden had served as president for only 3 percent of the total 20-year war.
In contrast to Biden's critics (including the Washington Post's David Von Drehle, quoted in the previous chapter), world-class author and journalist David Rothkopf of the Atlantic explained how he saw the Afghan situation and Biden's role in it: “Joe Biden doesn't ‘own' the mayhem on the ground right now. What we're seeing is the culmination of twenty years of bad decisions by U.S. political and military leaders. If anything, Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks. President Biden deserves credit, not blame…. [The previous administrations] all conveniently forgot that they were responsible for some of America's biggest errors in this war and instead were incandescently self-righteous in their invective against the ...
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