QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 11:01 A.M. ET:  Silvio Canto Jr., on whose radio show I regularly appear, and whose website is here,  alerts us to a column in The Economist, which well defines, in this quote, Obama's problem in trying to be commander-in-chief:

But the real failing exposed by the McChrystal fiasco is that the senior members of the president’s national-security team are at sixes and sevens and that he has allowed them to stay that way for a while. It has, accordingly, not taken long for this week’s events to revive the question of whether the Democrats can handle the armed forces as well as the Republicans. Les Gelb, a veteran journalist and former Pentagon official, suggests that the generals have more faith in Republican politicians to issue clear orders and stay the course when wars turn sour.

And...

Mr Obama, it seems, wants it both ways. That is understandable. Like Johnson before him, he is torn between his desire to build a liberal America at home and his need to fight an old-fashioned war abroad. He wants to succeed in Afghanistan but senses the limits of what America can achieve there. He would like the courage of his convictions but also a second term. To square these wants he may therefore have been a bit too clever for his own good. The great review last autumn produced a plan that both ramped up the war in a hurry and, with an eye on the 2012 election, set a date of July 2011 to begin to wind it down as well. The aim was to give the generals a chance to make progress and himself a chance to extract the forces if the generals failed.

It is ingenious—far more so than the refusal of Mr Bush to believe the experts who told him the Iraq war was lost. But winning a war can require a single-minded will as well as a subtle brain. Mr Obama has the latter; whether he has the stubbornness to stick to an unpopular war remains to be seen.

Very well said.  I would add that most military people I know have more faith in Republicans to uphold the nation's values.  We are not, after all, dealing with the Democratic Party of FDR, Truman, or Kennedy.  This is McGovern's party, a party that is instinctively anti-military and even isolationist. 

No president should have to prove himself to generals.  It's usually the other way around.  But, in the real world, not the world of Constitutional theory, the military must have confidence in its leaders.  Our fighters in Afghanistan will have confidence in David Petraeus.  Will they have confidence in their commander-in-chief?  That will depend on him, and no amount of media hype about him can sway troops in the field.

June 27, 2010