Where's Obama? Where He Wants to Be

This author thinks the president is strangely disengaged. I disagree.

I think that he has some grand ideas about transforming America domestically, and as a big picture guy he is fine with Congress or his departments hammering out the details in statutes and administrative rules.

And while President Obama has been strangely disengaged when foreign crises crop up, he has not hesitated to speak up on local or state events. That's where his interests lie.

It all makes sense if you think of the president just wanting quiet abroad while he transforms America at home. But the world is encroaching on us in the relative vacuum of our retreat from involvement. Yes, we wage war on terrorists, try to win in Afghanistan, and play by the rules as we pull out of Iraq. But these are obvious places where a loss could harm the president's domestic agenda. I'm happy the president is doing well on these issues, but they are economy of force operations while he works on his main front at home.

The world is not so accommodating. September 11, 2001, forced President Bush to becomes a foreign policy president when he had no intention of doing that. What will shake President Obama's domestic focus and make him think of himself as a war president?

President Obama is a war president. He just doesn't feel it yet, but that is where he needs to be. That's what America and the West need him to be.