Wednesday, December 2, 2009

The Reluctant Warrior in Obama's Afghanistan speech

from Jas Taranto's WSJ column:
The policy Obama adopted after months of ostentatious dithering is about as good as anyone could have expected, but the tone of his speech doesn't seem to have inspired anyone. Here's Tunku Varadarajan's review:
What has struck me most about Obama's Afghan enterprise--and his speech did not cause me to alter my view--is how obvious it is that he doesn't really want to do it. He wants to do health care. Obama has tried every delaying trick in the book--waiting for three months after Gen. McChrystal's request for more troops, having meeting after meeting after meeting, sending Gen. Jones to tell McChrystal not to ask for more troops, having his economic team say it will cost too much, framing the venture in terms of "exit strategies" rather than victory, etc. His ambivalence was on naked display [last night]. Can you imagine Churchill delivering a speech like this, one so full of a sense of the limitation of national possibilities? No wonder Hillary [Clinton]--when the camera panned to her--looked like she needed a drink. No wonder the cadets all looked so depressed. Would you want Eeyore for commander in chief?
Across the Atlantic, Der Spiegel's Gabor Steingart had a similar reaction:
Obama's magic no longer works. The allure of his words has grown weaker.
It is not he himself who has changed, but rather the benchmark used to evaluate him. For a president, the unit of measurement is real life. A leader is seen by citizens through the prism of their lives--their job, their household budget, where they live and suffer. And, in the case of the war on terror, where they sometimes die.

Political dreams and yearnings for the future belong elsewhere. That was where the political charmer Obama was able to successfully capture the imaginations of millions of voters. It is a place where campaigners--particularly those with a talent for oration--are fond of taking refuge. It is also where Obama set up his campaign headquarters, in an enormous tent called "Hope."
In his speech on America's new Afghanistan strategy, Obama tried to speak to both places. It was two speeches in one. That is why it felt so false. Both dreamers and realists were left feeling distraught. This overstates the case.
Only those who were taken in by Obama's "magic" in the first place have any reason to feel distraught. The rest of us wish he were better suited to the role of wartime president. In this respect, at least, the country would be better off if Obama really did have brilliant oratorical skills. Yet to paraphrase Rich Lowry paraphrasing Secretary Rumsfeld, you go to war with the president you have, not the one you'd like to have.

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