Biden is handling the Ukraine crisis extremely well

Why don't his approval numbers reflect that?

President Joe Biden’s approval rating is in the toilet (41.1 percent) even though his job performance right now is better than we’ve seen since he took office a little over a year ago. I can’t explain why. I also can’t explain why nobody’s writing about it. I’ve seen precisely one piece saying so, by Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark. Bill Kristol tweeted it out approvingly. Apparently you have to be a Never Trumper to acknowledge the obvious fact of Biden’s skillful handling of Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. Republican loyalists will never acknowledge it, of course, but even liberals and the left seem strangely silent. The mainstream press won’t write it because there’s an unwritten rule that stories assessing presidential performance must align with approval ratings. Otherwise they aren’t “objective.”

Anyway, I wrote about Biden’s strong performance on Ukraine in The New Republic. You can read that piece, which is tied to tonight’s State of the Union speech, here.