Obama's Oval Office speech was good, but the gravitas was great 
 
 President Obama’s Oval Office speech was good, but the iconography was great. 
 
 In his address marking the effective end of the Iraq War, Obama used the setting well. The flags behind him, the family pictures on either side, the flag pin in his lapel, the red tie, white shirt and blue suit... it all projected patriotism and authority. 
 
 One thing that worked in the speech was his drawing a straight line between the vast monetary cost of the war and the economic slough of despond in which we're mired. One thing that didn't work was his assertion that with the end of combat in Iraq, we were turning a page. We're still at war, and Obama said that now more resources are available for Afghanistan. 
 
 Politicos will be universally dissatisfied. Liberals will say he gave George W. Bush too much credit; conservatives, not enough. But I think he did himself and his party some good tonight. He was generous enough to Bush, resolute in his intentions and obviously sincere in his praise of the troops. He wore the presidency with an accessory that Americans expect and appreciate: gravitas. ||||| What was Obama's Oval Office address about, exactly? 
 
 Excuse me, but what was President Obama’s Oval Office speech about? 
 
 
 
 Was it about Iraq, as we were led to expect, or was it about Afghanistan, as we were not led to expect? Was it about the economy, which the president mentioned, or education, which he also mentioned? Could it have been directed at Iraqis, whom the president praised in terms they would not have recognized, or was it about our troops, whom the president praised over and over again -- a kind of rhetorical tick that suggested he had run out of things to say? As a speech, Obama delivered a version of the pudding once served Winton Churchill. “Pray, remove it,” he supposedly said. “It lacks theme.” 
 
 
 
 An Oval Office speech is supposed to be an important event. This was only Obama’s second, after all, and if he asks us all to interrupt our schedules and listen to what he has to say, then he at least ought to say something. In this, he dismally failed. We knew that American has ended its combat role in Iraq. We knew that Iraq had been turned over to the Iraqis. We knew our troops are brave, that they have sacrificed much and that over 4,000 of them had died. This is all worth saying -- but not saying and saying and saying. 
 
 
 
 Obama did have his moment. He extended a hand to his predecessor, George W. Bush, and he said it was “time to turn the page.” This was Obama at his most generous, and it was a theme of his that deserves praise. As a nation, we suffer a kind of slow arsenic poisoning from toxic partisanship. But the best he could say about Bush is that he, too, loved the troops and his country. This I, for one, never doubted. But these are also the qualities of a Boy Scout -- nice, but not quite presidential. Bush was a dismal president. 
 
 
 
 The love of troops has become the mindless trope of our times. It squelches both thought and criticism. And while the troops do deserve support, surely the best way to support them is to make sure that they are used wisely. This was not the case in Iraq, and Tuesday the president did not convince that it is in the case in Afghanistan. This was a bad speech, lacking both content and emotional wallop. The best that can be said for it is that it suited the Iraq war itself. Like the war, it should not have been undertaken. ||||| President Barack Obama on Wednesday night tacked to the right with appeals for tax cuts for small business and new investments in off-shore oil drilling and nuclear power. He tacked to the left with renewed vows to let gays serve in the military and to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. 
 
 He sounded at times like a Bill Clinton-style centrist, at others like a bank-bashing populist. He taunted Republicans, and also presented himself as a lonely tribune of cooperation and bipartisan civility in Washington. 
 
 In a favorable light, his State of the Union speech may have revealed the mind of a leader who has never cared much about traditional ideological categories and is determined to create his own results-oriented composite of ideas from across the spectrum. 
 
 Less charitably, the address could be interpreted as the work of a president who is desperately improvising by touching every political erogenous zone he and his advisers can think of. 
 
 Under either judgment, however, it was inescapable that his 69-minute speech — for all the rush of words and policy ideas — was a document of downsized ambitions for a downsized moment in his presidency. 
 
 It was presented to the Congress and a national audience with all of Obama’s usual fluency and brio. There were flashes of wit, as when he noted ruefully that “by now, it should be fairly obvious that I didn't take on health care because it was good politics.” 
 
 And there were flashes of defiance, with Obama delivering what the White House clearly intended to be the headline quote: “We don’t quit; I don’t quit.” 
 
 But there was no mistaking throughout this box-checking, loosely bundled speech how different the political context in the winter of 2010 is from the winter of 2009. 
 
 Obama came into office promising to shatter expectations of what was possible in Washington. The talk then was of a presidential “big bang” — health care, global warming, and financial reform legislation all in one year — and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel boasted that his motto was to “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” 
 
 With the big-bang strategy officially a failure, Obama’s speech revealed in real-time a president groping for a new and more effective one. The speech was woven with frequent acknowledgements that the laws of political gravity applied to him after all. 
 
 The first and most pressing legislative goals he identified were a comparatively small jobs bill that has passed the House but is languishing in the Senate, and a Bill Clinton-style menu of tax incentives for business. 
 
 Health care, the consuming issue of 2009 and the one on which Obama aides insisted they should be judged, did not show up until more than halfway through. ||||| AP/Charles Dharapak 
 
 I may be the only person in the United States who was trying to wait for President Obama's Afghanistan speech to make up my mind about his war plans. Of course, I mostly failed at that. Sure, all of Obama's options are bad, but still, few decisions seem as clear-cut as this one. Escalation is hard to see as an exit strategy. Obama has no clear path to "victory." We are likely to waste more lives than we save. I thought that was true before Obama's big speech, and I still think it now, afterward. 
 
 At the moment he needed all of his persuasive powers, Obama gave the worst major speech of his presidency. I admit: I expected to be, even wanted to be, carried away a bit by Obama's trademark rhetorical magic. But I wasn't, not even a little. I found the speech rushed, sing-songy and perfunctory, delivered by rote. I despise the right-wing Obama-Teleprompter taunts, but even I wanted to say, Look at your audience, not the damn Teleprompter, Mr. President. Obama looked haggard, his eyes deeper set, and I believe this decision pained him. But I'm not sure even he believes it's the right decision. Neocon Danielle Pletka tweeted happily mid-speech: "So far, could be Bush speaking," and later, approvingly: "count me gobsmacked." That makes two of us. Rep. Maxine Waters spoke for me on "Countdown" tonight when she opened her remarks by telling Keith Olbermann: "I'm very saddened." 
 
 On specifics: Obama lost me early by rehashing the history of our decision to invade Afghanistan, using mawkish and tired 9/11 imagery. We all know why we went in, and most Democrats supported it: to topple the Taliban government that harbored and supported al-Qaida as it plotted to kill almost 3,000 people in 2001. The question is why are we escalating now? I didn't hear a compelling reason. Obama sugarcoated the problems with the corrupt Karzai administration, and this year's disputed election, with a dismissive "although it was marred by fraud" it was "consistent with the constitution." Wow, that's inspiring. He told Karzai "the days of the blank check are over," but barely defined what that means. The most chilling story I read today was Juan Cole's, on the way Afghanistan's parliament is MIA, and the country's various governmental agencies, from ministries of public works to agriculture, have spent a fraction of the limited funds they have available. It made me hugely pessimistic that Obama's promise of a "civilian surge" had a prayer of making a difference. He needed to address the dysfunction within the Afghan government more specifically to convince me that he could find a way out. 
 
 The president also fudged by calling the Afghanistan/Pakistan border "the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda" -- yet it seems to me it actually matters to our strategy which side of the admittedly blurry border is the bigger problem. Finally, maybe most disputably, Obama insisted "we are not facing a broad-based insurgency." It may not be country-wide, but we are certainly facing a broad-based Pashtun insurgency, one that only seems to grow the more troops we send. Obama invoked Iraq -- mistakenly, in my opinion, many times -- but to the extent that the "surge" there was a limited if likely temporary success, it was because it met up with the "Sunni awakening," a homegrown rebellion against al-Qaida and a weariness with war among formerly insurgent Sunnis. Obama needs a "Pashtun awakening," but so far the only one on the horizon features Pashtuns waking up to fight the U.S. Some liberals might be encouraged by his promise to begin withdrawing troops by the summer of 2011, but given the uncertainty of the strategy, who can trust that? 
 
 So what's an increasingly disappointed Democrat and Obama supporter to do? 
 
 First of all, it would help to admit that in this case, Obama is keeping a campaign promise, not breaking one. Most liberal Obama backers probably either disagreed with his stance on Afghanistan, or didn't take it seriously. Still, many sold him as the only progressive candidate in the race, in stark contrast with the hawkish Hillary Clinton. That was never true, and Obama proved it last year when he made Clinton his secretary of state and kept Robert Gates as defense secretary. The howls of betrayal by progressives I respect like Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington and Keith Olbermann are at least partly a measure of their own misunderstanding of Obama's candidacy. The American left needs to smarten up, and toughen up, if it wants to make deep, lasting change in this country. 
 
 I'm deeply disappointed, saddened even, but I don't feel betrayed. Obama has governed like the centrist he told us and showed us he is, from his early flip-flops on FISA to his Goldman Sachs-friendly bailout policies to compromising on the job-creation parts of his economic stimulus to his tepid backing of a healthcare reform public option. It's going to take hard work by activists on all of those fronts to push him to better solutions. 
 
 Still, I'd be remiss if I didn't stress, once again, that the president faced only bad choices in making this decision, thanks to the incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administration. Every day Dick Cheney becomes more despicable, most recently allowing his handmaidens John Harris and Jim Vandehei from Politico to transcribe his raspy, hateful utterances trashing the president on the eve of this crucial national security announcement. "Here's a guy, without much experience, who travels around the world apologizing," Cheney told his stenographers. He even accused Obama of giving "aid and comfort" to al-Qaida, which is, I believe, the definition of treason. Classy. The former vice-president is as deranged as the Birthers who used monkey imagery in a Washington Times ad to label Obama a "usurper." But he's Obama's best friend, because he reminds the left that as disappointing as this president is, on so many, many fronts, he's not Cheney. Small comfort tonight, but it's something.
– The verdicts are in on President Obama's Oval Office address to mark the end of major US combat operations in Iraq, and he apparently didn't please many people. The president just wasn't entertaining enough for Bill O'Reilly. The president seemed like a "boring professor," the O'Reilly Factor host complained, criticizing even the way Obama held his hands. "You can’t get him on substance, so you go over his style," guest Alan Colmes retorted. Obama's "grim little speech" failed to ask—or answer—the important questions: "Did it make America safer, and was it really worth it?" complains Roger Simon at Politico. The president, he writes, let George Bush off the hook for a costly war that "began as a fraud." Obama portrayed the official end of the war not as an opportunity to refocus on Afghanistan, but as the time to get America back to work, notes Alex Pareene at Salon. "I don't think it was a particularly great or memorable speech," he writes. "I also think it scarcely would've mattered if it had been a great speech in this media environment and political climate, but this is more or less the withdrawal we were promised." The Washington Post's scribes are split: Obama said nothing, complains Richard Cohen. It was good, counters Eugene Robinson, who adds, "He wore the presidency with an accessory that Americans expect and appreciate: gravitas."