View from Sleepy Joe Biden’s home town: he’s done what everyone else talked about (original) (raw)

Sitting on her front porch, Anne Kearns defends the man who lived in her house as a boy. President Biden has got it right on Afghanistan, she thinks: despite the consequences, it is time to bring America’s troops home.

“He is doing tremendously,” says the retired professor, who moved into the president’s childhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1962. “We have to get out. If I had lost a son over there, I would be furious that they had to fight for another country. The other night when I heard him say that we would not be there any more — that was wonderful.”

Inside the three-storey property are scribbled messages from Scranton’s most famous son, including one from a visit on election day last November. “From this house to the White House with the grace of God. Joe Biden 11-3-2020,” it reads.

After his victory that day the president was largely untroubled by overseas crises. That changed last week with the Taliban’s unresisted capture of Kabul.

In the days that followed Biden was accused of incompetence, negligence and cruelty, and blamed for abandoning Americans in the debacle of the final exit from Afghanistan.

While the world watched the harrowing scenes around Kabul airport in horror, Biden’s domestic approval ratings slumped. One poll last week put support for him at less than 50 per cent for the first time during his presidency, and now only a minority say they support the withdrawal of US troops.

Perhaps the most damning criticism came from Ryan Crocker, who was America’s ambassador in Kabul from 2011 to 2012, when Biden was vice-president.

“I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander-in-chief,” Crocker told a newspaper in Washington state. “To have read this so wrong — or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care.”

Yet Biden, 78, who has a long history of scepticism about US involvement in Afghanistan, has remained unapologetic and unequivocal: there was never going to be a good time to leave, and America’s longest war had to end.

Assuming he stands in 2024, the president has bet the White House on the belief that voters will ultimately care more about jobs, new roads and bringing the troops home than about the plight of those left behind, no matter how humiliating the withdrawal.

Biden has spent decades nurturing his image as “Scranton Joe”, a career politician who has never lost touch with the union members and blue-collar workers of his hometown.

Scranton, a Democratic stronghold in northern Pennsylvania, was once the centre of the state’s coal industry but fell into decline after the Second World War. Regeneration efforts have had modest success and the city almost went bankrupt in 2012.

It is almost impossible to find anyone here who disagrees with the president’s ending of the Afghan war.

Down the road from Biden’s childhood home, Carole and Ken Brubaker are sitting on a bench. “Twenty years is long enough — it’s time to get out,” says Carole. “Maybe some better planning was needed to get the Americans and the translators out; why not do it before the end? But it is the right thing to do.”

Her husband says: “I’m from the Vietnam era. I was in the air force during that time. It’s similar: the lack of support for the troops, the politicians playing a game for so many years. It’s a good move by Biden. He listed the fact that he’s the fourth president handling this, and he was not going to pass it on to another. I think it is due.”

Jayne Lloyd, an office worker, is a dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter and yet, on the Afghanistan withdrawal, you cannot get a cigarette paper between her and the Democrat she loathes. “Biden is not doing his job, he is being erratic, he has not done anything to bring the country together,” she says.

After Biden’s election to the presidency a new sign was put opposite his childhood home

After Biden’s election to the presidency a new sign was put opposite his childhood home

CHRISTOPHER DOLAN/THE TIMES-TRIBUNE

“He should have got the Americans out first before the troops left. They got it badly wrong. But thank God it is over after so long.”

Drive 45 minutes up the road and you are not in Biden country any more. Honesdale is the biggest town in Wayne County, where two-thirds of people voted for Trump.

Jane Brooks, a registered Republican who works in a museum on the high street, says Biden has gone up in her estimations.

“It’s horrible. Everything’s such a mess,” she says. “I wish it would all just go away. But I feel that this whole thing in Afghanistan has been going on for 20 years and nothing has happened, except a lot of American soldiers, and those from other countries, have been killed. Fighting for what? They have gained very little. It is another Vietnam.”

She does not expect the issue to tilt the next election. “When they vote, people think about their own wallets first, and everything else is secondary.”

In Washington DC political insiders recall foreign policy disasters that undermined presidents, most notably Jimmy Carter, whose inability to solve the Iran hostage crisis contributed to his defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Brett Bruen, a former diplomat who served in the White House under Barack Obama, says voters are concerned when America is perceived to be in danger.

“What brought Trump to power was this sense of threat from the outside. Well, extremists are all of a sudden on the rise, not just in Afghanistan but in other parts of the world.

“If the spectre of another 9/11 style attack can be invoked as a potential threat, what we are going to see is a very different political dynamic.

“So I think Biden was really short-sighted in suggesting that foreign policy or Afghanistan in particular were not going to be considerations, especially for key groups in the United States that he needs to win over.”

“People in office have more information than people out of office,” says Andrew Card, George W Bush’s chief of staff when the Afghan war began in 2001.

“But I’m very troubled by the way this whole thing has unfolded in terms of getting out of Afghanistan, and I was very upset to see what has happened.”

To date, 2,448 US service personnel has been killed in Afghanistan, and while it cannot be argued that the conflict has ended in anything other than defeat, those who have served on the front line applaud Biden for pushing ahead with what his three predecessors promised but failed to deliver.

“Nobody who has not served in Afghanistan could care less about Afghanistan,” says Timothy Kudo, a writer and US marine veteran who served in the war. “I don’t know what else he could have done, frankly. Biden made the right decision. Any time we wanted to end the war there was going to be chaos.

“Americans are so tired of this war. The fact that Biden was willing to not pass the buck to the next president, I think that is an enormous thing for our country.”