AMAC Exclusive By: Daniel Roman
Many AMAC readers are able to remember the moment Ronald Reagan clinched the 1980 election. It was the night of the one and only debate of the campaign, incumbent President Jimmy Carter having refused proposals to include independent candidate John Anderson, in what many believed to be a deliberate attempt to prevent any debates from taking place. With hindsight, avoiding the debates altogether would have been a wiser course for Carter. That evening, less than a week before election day, Jimmy Carter lost the race. He lost the race by behaving like Jimmy Carter, and thereby provided Ronald Reagan, supposed right-wing former actor, the chance to humanize himself by, well…acting human. Reagan came across like a normal American unpleasantly trapped in a conversation with the grating and arrogant Carter.
“Well, there you go again!” Reagan said.
The line is immortalized in the memories of millions, but the context deserves to be too, especially to anyone who has watched Joe Biden speak to the nation on Afghanistan in recent weeks. The similarities between Biden and Carter are legion, and they do not lie merely in substantive policy approaches or accusations of weakness. They go deeper, into the two men’s personalities. Carter was an abrasive individual, intellectually overconfident, and unable to back away from a fight. In practice, this meant Carter could not apologize without casting blame on those he apologized to, or admit error without arguing that he had done better than anyone else could have, or suggesting that other people bore more blame than he himself.
In that moment on the debate stage, Ronald Reagan did not merely say, “Well there you again!” His follow up, “Are you better off now than four years ago” was aimed at the millions of Americans whose lives were worse. But it also reminded voters of something else. It cut to the heart of the man he was on stage with. Reagan in effect asked his listeners “Do you want four more years of this?” And the answer for most Americans was a dramatic NO. Carter led by an average of 2% in polls going into the final debate. Less than a week later, he lost by 10%.
Jimmy Carter, largely though his post-presidential work, has tried to create a myth that he was unlucky. But as Napoleon suggested of his marshals, men create their own luck. It was Carter who transformed the challenges he faced—whether in Iran, Asia, Afghanistan, or at home—into historic setbacks. It would be unfair to blame Carter for the unpopularity of the Shah, or the incompetent short sightedness of the liberal Iranian opposition, or the foolishness of Arab leaders who tried to use oil as a weapon against Israel only to have it create far more dangerous enemies. It is, however, possible to blame Carter for making these his personal misfortunes and the misfortunes of the nation.
Carter often failed on these issues by his inability to detach himself from his role. The job of President is stressful, even when faced with a friendlier media than that which assailed Donald Trump. Carter, while a smart man, was one who saw criticisms of his policies or decisions as personal attacks on himself. Anyone who disagreed with him was casting personal aspersions about his ideas and intelligence.
When Walter Mondale arranged in the 1980 campaign for Carter to meet with foreign policy realists, Democrat academics and diplomats who were disappointed with his weakness toward the Soviet Union, they told him they were encouraged he’d admitted his view of the Soviets had changed after the invasion of Afghanistan. Carter denied he had ever said any such thing. That was it for them. They endorsed Reagan shortly thereafter.
But the trouble went further, implicating not just politics but policy. Because Carter’s ideas were his, and were clearly right, their failures had to be the fault of others. Hence, his infamous malaise speech, where he blamed the low level of confidence shown by Americans in the economy on the low self-esteem among Americans, similar to when he argued that the energy crisis was due to Americans not conserving. The result was to make every interaction between the American people and their president adversarial.
It also meant that for a man who made his post-presidential reputation on empathy, it was impossible to display it. He could not explain a failure of policy without explaining that he was right to do it, he implemented it correctly, but it failed because of other people. The words in an apology do not work if the succeeding sentence involves excuses, much less accusations.
For anyone watching Joe Biden’s speech on Tuesday, or really any time over the past few weeks, the image is familiar. The proper words of defense were there. He stated repeatedly that he took full responsibility, allowing US media to run with that headline. In this way his speechwriters allowed this minimum of political cover for the mainstream media. But for anyone else, it was hard to believe this apology was genuine, or extracted without the most strenuous effort by his speechwriting team. As if a Frankenstein monster had been glued together on the page, each effort to apologize, show empathy, or take responsibility was followed by an accusation, defense, or moment of self-pity.
Biden stated that most Americans who wanted to had been able to leave, and that he was dedicated to helping those who remained return, but he subsequently cast blame on those who remained in Afghanistan, saying they had plenty of time to make plans to depart – months, he suggested (ignoring his own State Department’s warnings not to travel to Kabul, and not to approach the airport if present in Kabul). Biden then went on to suggest that many of these Americans were dual nationals who had likely decided to remain long ago. Whether this was true or not in some cases is beside the point. The point was, it was their fault not his. You got the sense that Biden thought he was doing them a favor, and more than they deserved.
Even when it came to matters of logistics rather than human life, Biden seemed to veer widely from self-praise to defensiveness. He suggested that he had little choice due to Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban, but then stated his belief that the Taliban would enable further departures. Within the space of two minutes, he both stated that there was no way that the evacuation could have been orderly under the circumstances, implying it was far from orderly, and then declared it an extraordinary success. Al Jazeera, showing a much more critical eye than US media, captured both moments.
Perhaps there were two groups of speechwriters warring with one another. Or perhaps it was Joe Biden himself, revolting against his speechwriters who insisted he must show some signs of sympathy or contrition. In either event, Biden was having none of it. The President made abundantly clear that whatever the words present in the teleprompter, or distributed ahead of time to the press, he felt he had done nothing wrong. He had failed no one. Not the Afghans, not American servicemen, not Americans left behind. They had all failed themselves, and he was the victim of having to explain their failures to the press.
This is the same victim complex which brought down Carter. It was what Carter’s “Georgia Boys” conveyed, much in the same way Biden’s Senate office veterans, the “Delaware Boys” —Jake Sullivan at NSC, Anthony Blinken at State, and Ron Klain as Chief of Staff—display irritation every time they discuss Afghanistan. And they are boys. Jen Psaki has clearly had enough, already having announced plans to depart leaving an all-male, defiant team. For all that liberals and Democrats like to talk about a culture of “toxic masculinity” which makes admitting error or apologizing impossible, it has never been more on display than in their White House.
We are currently eight months into a 48-month term, and already, people around the world are asking themselves “Are we better off than we were 8 months ago?” No less than three European officials asked me that on Tuesday.
This is about more than Afghanistan, just as Carter’s issues were about more than Iran. Afghanistan has revealed in vivid fashion the pettiness, insecurity, and defensiveness behind Joe Biden, and an administration which feels the need to leak to the international press that Biden intends to “punish” Britain for its Afghanistan criticism, proving how petty he really is. We can only hope another Reagan will call him out. Maybe even a man who has been there before.
Daniel Roman is the pen name of a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics.
