But the president has utterly failed to use his supposedly magical speaking ability (I never got any leg tingles, that's for sure--blinding headaches, sure, but no tingles) to rally the American public behind the need to endure casualties to win the war:
If the commander in chief doesn’t defend the war and make a case for his chosen strategy, the American public has little else to go on but the most garish of headlines. Afghanistan was supposed to be the “good war” that this administration wasn’t going to neglect as — it charged — the Bush administration had done. Yet today, the only thing coming from the Obama administration on the subject is radio silence.
Even Bush would make what I considered stirring defenses of the Iraq War to try to check the fall in support to win the war. I constantly complained that Bush didn't do that week in and week out, but at least he made the effort. And in the end, he did just enough to sustain support until we could win on the battlefield. If only he'd done enough to extend public support through the Obama administration to have allowed the continuation of our troop presence.
But now, President Obama hasn't been willing to do even what Bush did, and the question is still out over whether we can stay the course until we defeat the Taliban on the battlefield. What's distracting President Obama from fighting and winning the real war, anyway? Oh, right. That's the "real" war now.
Oh yeah, I miss him.
