In politics, you’re either on-message or you are losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week, Reframing Ugly Pictures. The pen is mightier than the sword but the camera beats them both.
This week, Americans were rightfully horrified by images of desperate Afghan citizens doing everything they possibly could to get out of their country as American military forces departed and the Taliban took over.
The remarkably swift collapse of the Afghan government came within just 90 minutes. For reference, it would actually take you longer to go back and watch all 30 episodes of On Message.
As the events unfolded, the race was on to control the narrative. While Twitter whipped into a frenzy, the White House speechwriting team faced a more daunting task with each passing moment at each retweet of those images. Around 4:00 p.m. Eastern, the President addressed the nation from the East Room.
Now, there was no real victory to be won with this speech. The best the White House could hope for was to reframe the conversation and just shift attention away from the images, which up until this speech were doing all of the talking. The first decision: fold or double down.
– [President Biden] I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. Forces.
– Okay, so double down it is. Now the speech needs to defend the decision and reframe it in a way that helps people see the bigger picture. It was also essential to acknowledge that elephant in the room.
– [President Biden] The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S Military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
– One thing the Biden team was counting on as he made of during his speech a couple of times, is that Americans no longer want to put troops in harm’s way or spend money building Afghanistan. In this speech, he needed to move from, “how awful is what’s happening?” to “here’s why this is probably a good thing in the long run.”
– [President Biden] How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more Americans lives is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones in Arlington National Cemetery? I’m clear on my answer. I will not repeat mistakes we’ve made in the past.
– Faced with a very difficult task, I think this speech accomplished what it could. Though the images of Afghans fighting for an escape from the Taliban will be forever linked to President Biden, he was still able to reframe his actions by acknowledging the collapse was surprisingly swift and redirecting attention to the key point that ending operations in Afghanistan is the right thing to do and long overdue.
Solid speech but images are always more powerful than words. In 2021 what matters is what’s shareable. More people saw Afghans desperate to get out of their country than heard the President’s speech. How it impacts public opinion and Biden’s approval rating remains to be seen.
That’s it for this week. More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground. Make sure you visit the site and sign up for our weekly email update. You can find more On Message videos, in-depth Utah political stories and analysis, plus podcasts and more at utahpoliticalunderground.com.
