Shovel Work
Conducting excavations on a Washington Post poll story, “Americans deeply split on troop increase.” These are sometimes promising sites, but you have to dig deep. Let’s have a look down the hole, see what we can see:
As President Obama and his war cabinet deliberate a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, Americans are evenly and deeply divided over whether he should send 40,000 more troops there, and public approval of the president’s handling of the situation has tumbled, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Ho hum, not so remarkable. Ordinary turf. Dum de dum …
Hold up. Graph two. A hint of buried treasure:
… The survey also found that a large majority of Americans say the administration lacks a clear plan for dealing with the problems in Afghanistan.
Interesting. Bring up the backhoe. We’re gonna need to move some fill. OK, six graphs deeper down:
… confidence in his leadership on the Afghan war has eroded since the spring. In previous polls, Obama received some of his highest ratings in relation to his dealings with Afghanistan, including 63 percent approval in April of his handling of the situation there. In the latest poll, 45 percent approve, down 10 percentage points in the past month alone, and 47 percent disapprove, an increase of 10 points. Nearly a third of those surveyed say they strongly disapprove.
Stop work on the site! I found something! Look, right there. In boldface. It turns out, while Obama’s been dawdling, approval of his handling of Afghanistan plummeted. OK, let’s get out the brushes. This is a delicate artifact, this abrupt Obama Dynasty downward polling spike … you don’t see something like this every day.
The Washington Post oddly doesn’t think so, finds this unremarkable. We’re on our hands and knees with toothbrushes, but it’s another seven graphs before we learn …
On the question of whether the administration has a clear strategy for Afghanistan, 63 percent of all Americans say it does not. More than eight in 10 Republicans, about two-thirds of independents and nearly half of Democrats think the administration does not have a clear plan.
Wow. Now that’s a pretty dramatic find.
Wait! Stop work! Good lord, I’ve never seen anything quite like this!
When it comes to strategic priorities, the public places about equal emphasis on preventing the establishment of al-Qaeda bases and keeping the Taliban from returning to power, upping the ante on the impending troop decision.
Apparently the American public … whatever they think about sending more American boys and girls to war, which a lot of them, unsurprisingly, don’t like … actually gets it. This important artifact could change much of the conventional thinking on the Obama era.
The new poll revealed little public interest in redefining the goal: Four in five Americans say U.S. policy should aim to prevent all elements of the Taliban from regaining power in Afghanistan, even if certain segments of the movement do not support terrorism against the United States. About two-thirds of those polled place a “high priority” on stopping the Taliban from taking over, and just as many prioritize guarding against new al-Qaeda camps. On these questions, there are minimal differences across party lines.
So the vast majority of Americans … think it’s worth it.
Just shows, you never know what you’ll find when you start excavations. Which brings us back to the divide between those who want to fight in Afghanistan, and those who’d rather not.
Based on these findings, I’m ready to hypothesize something here. Not only is approval of Obama’s war leadership plummeting, it is directly related to the fact that no one thinks he is exercising any. I know, it’s a bit of a tautology, but hear me out.
My theory is those are numbers of the sort that would turn around the minute the president made a decision and came out convincingly for it. Which is to say, when he starts exercising some wartime leadership.
But based on the remarkable evidence of the American public’s grasp of the strategic situation, I’m going to go a little farther out on the limb and suggest, that if the president of the United States comes out and says, “We’re going to fight this war, we know how to fight this war, we’ve seen that we can be successful in wars like this one before, and we have no choice, for our own national security, for the security of the world, and to maintain our position as the leading champion of freedom in the world, but to fight this war” … then the poll numbers will turn dramatically in his favor.
On the other hand, if he comes out and says, “We’re pulling back, we’re going light, we’re standing off, we don’t have to do this thing I told you was a matter of necessity, we’re advancing to the rear” … then I won’t have to dig deep to locate the disapproval numbers in Washington Post stories anymore. They’ll unearth themselves. They’ll be pushing themselves up out of the ground like rocks in a New England farm field in winter. Or maybe leaping out, with great explosions of dirt and gaping jaws, more like the giant death worms in “Dune.”
Hyscience draws together some thought on the effects of thumb-twiddling.
Thunder Run and Mudville have your groundviews and news roundups.
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Topics: Afghanistan, Obama
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:25 am on Wednesday, October 21, 2009
4 Responses to “Shovel Work”
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October 21st, 2009 at 9:56 am
It appears to me that Obama came in with a certain set of priorities and plans. The rest were all to be just vague promises until he accomplished those first. Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t act that way and now he is scrambling to get things done. This is how I expect a teenager to act, not a grown man in his late forties. He and his handlers just didn’t get it; no plan survives first contact. People are less concerned with the manufactured crisis of health care reform and more concerned with personal security at home and national security abroad. He doesn’t get it and this is not a Chicago pothole or garbage strike you can put off till you deal with the park beautification project. Real decisions require a real leader. Unfortunately, we have a politician who stumbles from crisis to crisis.
October 21st, 2009 at 11:27 am
[...] I have to say the information below was made possible only by Jules Crittenden excellent grasp of archeology. He really revealed his talents by finding the facts and the real story to be told hidden beneath [...]
October 21st, 2009 at 3:48 pm
I think once you’ve hit 5/5 of internal wartime reviews, it’s about time to say what your conclusion is. I don’t understand what exactly the WH is waiting for–Gates has essentially signaled that some level of troop deployment will be honored, and at this point its become nearly three months of consideration. I’m all for a robust understanding of the situation, but since we’re going into our ninth year of this war, shouldn’t the WH step up and tell us what they’re going to do with it already?
October 21st, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Eureka! After brushing away all the fluff and obfuscation with a toothbrush, I’ve come up with an astounding conclusion: Bush was right!