The combination of tragedy, confusion and cost is what makes leadership so difficult.
There’s a gathering sense that President Biden’s response to the war in Gaza may cost him the 2024 election. A recent Gallup poll showed that his support among Democrats has slipped 11 points in the past month to 75 percent, the lowest of his presidency. On Friday my colleagues in the newsroom reported on a growing backlash against Biden coming from young and left-leaning voters.
Does this mean that standing with Israel could be politically fatal for Biden? I don’t think so, and to understand why, it’s important to understand the core responsibilities of an American president.
In 2012, when I was a partisan supporter of Mitt Romney, there was one message from President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign that I thought made the most succinct and persuasive case for his second term. It was delivered most memorably by then-Vice President Biden, of all people, at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. He said that Obama had “courage in his soul, compassion in his heart and a spine of steel,” and then Biden delivered the key line: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.”
Jill Lawrence: “Joe Biden is our oldest president, as everyone keeps saying, but he’s also—despite and possibly because of his age—an unusually forward-looking president"
Looking forward 5 years to when all those children being bombed become fresh recruits for Hamas or whatever even more radical organization takes their place.
If you were an arms manufacturer (military industrial complex) and needed a controlled environment to test out various surveillance, antipersonnel, nonlethal (we all know these can be lethal) gear (and various software for face recognition, sigint, predictive modeling, etc) in various settings, it's hard to imagine a "better" set up.
Where are they going to go?
How easy is it to control the supply of everything going in so you know what you are up against?
How simple to watch the area with satellite imagery?
How risky to get too involved know Israel has nukes and the US in its side?
My mind goes there sometimes. A lot of gear comes out of Israel "because they need it".
Now, look, I am not antisemitic. I'm just a person who has seen enough to know that no normal person wakes up the morning and wishes the world they are raising their kids had more violence. That's the work of sociopathic business people and their government pals craving power. It has nothing to do with the average persons culture, social status, or ethics.
You make it sound like the dems are just sitting around and anytime you ask where are the promises you made they just point to the right and say be glad we aren’t doing that; that is absolutely not the case.
Yeah I’m no Biden fan either but he has done quite a good job overall given the chaos-saturated Congress. No he had t fulfilled every promise but he has tried, no that’s not good enough but it sure as hell ain’t a “who cares” either.
The liberal version of 'I Could ... Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters.' and why politicians are total garbage, they are never held accountable for their actions. They can kill and their lemmings dont care.
Not at all. The alternative that "your side" will put forth literally tried to overthrow the last election he lost. Are we supposed to vote for that loser???
Yeah, Joe Biden knows exactly what he's doing, and that's the problem. The resulting government, leadership, and progress, or lack thereof, is exactly what is intended.
So how many Republican voters are out for blood? (Which I can't believe the about face done twice in rapid succession. That Iraq was a mistake, so/and can't afford the war in Ukraine, but now it's go time.)
He said that Obama had “courage in his soul, compassion in his heart and a spine of steel,” and then Biden delivered the key line: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.”
Consider what he confronts: a brutal Russian assault on a liberal democracy in Europe, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and an aggressive China that is gaining military strength and threatens Taiwan.
If Hamas can wound Israel so deeply and yet live to fight again, it will have accomplished what ISIS could not — commit acts of the most brutal terror and then survive as an intact organization against a military that possesses the power to crush it outright.
This instinct is magnified when the combination of the fog of war and Hamas disinformation can cause exaggerated or even outright false claims of Israeli atrocities to race across the nation and the world before the full truth is known.
Asked at a news conference about Biden’s observation that innocents will continue to die as Israel presses its attacks, Kirby responded with facts we cannot forget: “What’s harsh is the way Hamas is using people as human shields.
If Biden can persevere in the face of the chaos and confusion of war abroad and polarization at home, all while preserving a level of economic growth that is astonishing in contrast with the rest of the world, he’ll have his own story to tell in Chicago, one that should trump the adversity of any given moment or the concern generated by any given poll.
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