PRESIDENTIAL SPEECH TONIGHT – AT 8:45 P.M. ET:  During the 2008 presidential campaign Mr. Obama became our new "great communicator," with a speaking style that attracted millions.  Since taking office, though, the great communicator has turned into the magnificent mumbler, never quite getting his message across, and sometimes letting major issues like Libya slip by with virtually no explanation at all.

Tonight the president gives himself another chance, as he announces plans for Afghanistan.  Advance word is that he will take a middle course, announcing a drawdown of troops that is too much for his military advisers, too little for his critics on the left.  WaPo has some good insights on this:

President Obama will face a stiff political challenge Wednesday in presenting his plan for a gradual end to the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. His prime-time address must remind a skeptical electorate and a concerned Congress that the country’s longest war remains worth fighting — and funding — for several more years.

Obama’s generals have requested more time to consolidate the gains they say have been made since the president dispatched 33,000 additional U.S. troops to the country last year. The escalation, which angered his party’s antiwar base, followed a months-long strategy review to determine how to salvage a flagging war effort.

Since then, public opinion has turned increasingly against the war, except for a now-diminishing boost in approval after the killing of Osama bin Laden in May.

As he begins the promised withdrawal, Obama’s challenge will be to provide his generals with the resources to wage the war’s final phase while persuading Congress that, at a time of fiscal strain, maintaining most of a $10 billion-a-month war effort is worthwhile.

COMMENT:  A well-stated analysis.  You wonder sometimes what goes on in Obama's mind.  Is he really behind his own policies, or is he going through the motions just to avoid being called an appeaser?  Can he gather up the backbone to praise some of the policies of George W. Bush, which he's continued, or is Bush Derangement Syndrome still alive in the White House? 

This is a critical speech.  The president has chosen to take military action in Libya without so much as giving a speech on it to the American people.   Tonight he will talk of Afghanistan, where we've been for ten years.  Americans are understandably skeptical, and are made more so by the trendy reporting of the leftist press.  Obama must inform and convince, tasks he's failed at in office.

Senator James Webb of Virginia, a Vietnam veteran, has said that for 45 years we've lived a myth in this country – the myth that we lost the Vietnam War.  We never lost a battle in Vietnam.  Vietnam was lost because of cynical news reporting, much of it later shown to be inaccurate, and a loss of faith by the American people.  We pulled the plug on funding our South Vietnamese allies in 1975, an act of dishonor as President Ford said at the time, and sent them to their fate.  We face hard going in Afghanistan.  I can't claim to know the right answers.  But I hope we don't repeat the Vietnam experience, and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. 

June 22, 2011