This is how Kabul lives before the advance of the Taliban 1:59
(CNN) -
At the core of Joe Biden's presidential campaign was a single word: competition.
After four years of Donald Trump's incompetence in, well, everything, Biden's argument was that the country badly needed a firm hand at the helm, someone who would have been there and made it.
Someone who didn't need training to do the job.
Someone who was the exact opposite of the man currently in office.
And it worked.
Rather than viewing Biden's age (78) as a negative, many voters believed that his decades of experience were what the country needed in the post-Trump era.
Knowing how the federal bureaucracy worked was important.
So was having good relationships with world leaders.
And having seen everything there was to see both on the domestic front and on the foreign front.
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Yet seven months into his first term, Biden faces nothing less than a crisis of that competition, beset on several fronts by events that it seems that all his experience and knowledge have not been able to prevent.
The most obvious example is, of course, the rapid takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban following Biden's decision to withdraw US troops from the country.
In announcing the end of the US military engagement in Afghanistan just over a month ago, Biden had proclaimed that "there will be no circumstance where people are seen being lifted from the roof of a US embassy in Afghanistan."
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However, images of helicopters lifting people from the parking lot of the US Embassy in Kabul were transmitted to the United States over the weekend.
And even more devastating images arrived Monday morning: Afghans clinging to a US plane as it took off from the country.
A crowd tries to get on a plane in Kabul 1:33
CNN in Afghanistan: this is how you live inside the country controlled by the Taliban
The overwhelming message?
The situation was totally and completely out of control, and neither Biden nor his top foreign policy advisers could prevent it.
While the Afghanistan crisis is at the center of this reexamination of Biden's competition argument, it is by no means the only piece of data in that conversation.
Remember, in May, Biden announced that the CDC had said that vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks indoors, a fact that he described as a "huge milestone"?
However, just two months later, Biden was forced to back down amid a surge in cases caused by the delta variant.
And while Biden congratulated himself and the country this spring on the number of people who had been vaccinated against COVID-19, his administration fell short of its often stated goal of 70% of eligible adults received at least one dose of the vaccine before July 4.
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To be clear: The rise in the delta variant, driven by those who have yet to be vaccinated and by many Republican governors who refuse to follow guidelines to mitigate continued spread, cannot be entirely (not even for the most part) blamed. ) to Biden.
But there is no question that the dominant late-spring narrative - the Biden administration's competent management of a nationwide vaccine program and the withdrawal of the virus - has taken a major hit.
Then there is the border.
Detentions of those trying to cross the southern border of the United States illegally reached the highest level in the past two decades last month.
Alejandro Mayorkas, director of the Department of Homeland Security, admitted late last week that the United States faces a "serious challenge" at the border.
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While Mayorkas blamed at least part of the crisis on the Trump administration, which he said "dismantled our asylum system," there is also no question that the Biden administration is nowhere near where it wants or needs to be when it's about your handling of the border crisis.
As CNN's Priscilla Alvarez wrote last week: "The Biden administration has been caught between expressing compassion for migrants and relying heavily on deterrence from those traveling to the southern border of the United States. As a result, the border situation continues to be a political drag on the White House that is drawing criticism from both the left and the right. "
Given all of this, it's no wonder Biden's poll numbers have taken a hit lately.
The 50% approval rating for Biden's job at the end of last month was the lowest of his presidency, according to the Gallup poll.
And that was before the disaster in Afghanistan, which is dominating national news coverage, and the full scope of the COVID-19 wave was seen.
Biden's promise to the American people was that his years in public life had better prepared him to avoid the chaos that defined the Trump era.
But for now, chaos is beating the competition.
And that's a big problem for Biden and his administration.
Afghanistan Joe Biden