+Afghanistan: Taliban Promises...
mostly of unknowns from the province and has derisively been labelled the “Zukunftsteam” [future team]. It is probably too little, too late in the now “hot phase” of the election campaign, even though Merkel herself has warmly endorsed her fellow conservative Laschet. Moreover, postal voting as already started. With an expected 50 percent of voters expected to opt for main-in voting, it’s wide open if Laschet will be able to move the needle. Anton Hofreiter, leader of the Green Party parliamentary group, like others, was not impressed with the lineup, speaking of “helpless actionism”. He also said that Friedrich Merz, one of the members [a former Merkel adversary and Laschet’s rival for the CDU chairmanship in January] just “stands for regression and an economic policy of the past century.”
Biden’s Lousy Week
According to CNN’s Chris Cillizza, last week was truly awful for U.S. President Joe Biden (“The Point”/September 3).
Biden is doing his best to forget it all and get on with the job, but the despicable and hypocritical Republicans – both inside and outside of Congress – are using every trick in the trade of ‘dirty politics’ – to not let that happen anytime soon.
The main body blows Biden took last week:
First, the U.S. ended its military presence in Afghanistan on Tuesday – ignominiously. While Biden spoke several times to the nation in an attempt to smooth people’s ruffled feathers, the Islamic State- Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) suicide bomber who took 13 American military lives and those of at least 170 others, coupled with the overall chaos of the pullout, reflected very badly on him and his administration.
Second, the economy, plagued by the Covid-19 Delta variant – remained sluggish last month. Optimistic economists had expected that in August more than 700,000 new jobs would be added to the work force, but actually only 235,000 were created.
Third, Biden’s ambitious stimulus package stalled. Senator Joe Manchin, a critical moderate Democrat from West Virginia, said Thursday that his party needed to take a “strategic pause” in its efforts to pass the US Dollar $ 3.5 trillion stimulus package that Biden has described as necessary to overcome the economic meltdown caused by the pandemic.
Without Manchin on board, the Democrats in the Senate lack the 50 votes they need to pass the stimulus bill. The Republi. cans, as usual, are thinking only of their own party and careers and not of the nation, and will not help out.
Fourth, a new national poll from NPR/PBS/Marist showed Biden’s overall job approval dropping to just 43 percent, with 51 percent disapproving. Even more worrisome for Biden was that the percentage of people “strongly” disapproving of how he was performing as chief executive and commanderin-chief [41 percent] was more than double the number [19 percent] “strongly” approving of his job performance. However, much water will flow in the Potomac until the midterm elections in autumn 2022, when Biden will have time to rebound and the Democrats to hold their narrow majorities in the House and the Senate.
In the meantime, as CNN’s star commentator and Princeton professor Julian Zelizer wrote, Biden has to follow the trajectory of building political coalitions that can allow him to move forward (September 4).