Seeing Obama Through Educator's Eyes

I watched President Obama's West Point speech with a group of people who had assembled for a discussion on education reform. New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein was the featured speaker and offered a spirited assessment of the reforms he has put in place to close the race and achievement gap that for too long has stigmatized American education. After Klein left to catch the last shuttle back to New York, those who stayed for what our host, former FCC commissioner Susan Ness, called "a doubleheader," turned our attention to Obama.

No one talked during the speech other than to remark how young the cadets look. "They're just kids," someone said. I was eager to hear what the reaction would be to Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Those who stayed were, for the most part, identifiable as Democrats. Many had worked in the Clinton administration and supported Hillary in her bid for the presidency. This was a Hillary stronghold, though Obama had spoken to the group as a senator before announcing for the presidency, and was very well-received.

This was their president and their party, and they want him to succeed, but as the speech ended and Wolf Blitzer and Campbell Brown came on the screen, the mood was subdued as people filed into the living room to share their thoughts. Haynes Johnson, a former Washington Post reporter and co-author of The Battle for America, about the '08 election, started us off by declaring the speech the best Obama had given, putting him in the pantheon of presidents like FDR and Reagan, who with a single speech can transcend the moment.

It's not exactly news that Obama can deliver a helluva speech, and Johnson quickly reminded us that Obama is a weakened president, one of only three in the modern era to fall below 50 percent in his first year in the Gallup tracking poll. And because Obama started so high, at 68 percent, he has fallen a greater distance than his predecessors. It sounds ominous except for the fact that Reagan was one of the three, and that's pretty good company to keep when it comes to poll ratings.

During last year's campaign, Obama cited Reagan as a transformational president, even though he disagreed with his policies. Now Reagan is Obama's role model for having survived 10.8 percent unemployment in his first year and a loss of 27 House seats in his second year, and gone on to win reelection in a landslide. The economy would decide Obama's political future, Haynes said, and the other big question left unanswered is what happens after July 2011, the date Obama set to begin bringing U.S. soldiers home from Afghanistan.

He had to have an exit date, countered Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the center-right think tank American Enterprise Institute, or congressional Democrats would not back his war policy. Setting a timeline also sends a signal of urgency to the Karzai government to shape up and to the Afghan people that this is not a permanent occupation. While transparently political, I think a timeline is defensible as policy. Critics say all the Taliban has to do is wait us out. Defense Secretary Gates says that's fine. If they stop blowing things up for the next 18 months, that will give the surge troops a clear shot to rebuild the urban centers. My friends on the left think the withdrawal date is an empty promise, while the right likens it to the white flag of surrender, another instance where Obama's attempt to please both sides ends up pleasing no one. Either way, I think it's a safe bet that we will be in Afghanistan for a good long while.

As a card-carrying member of the left, I would have cheered if Obama had said he was beginning the drawdown from Afghanistan, that he had concluded it was an unwinnable war, and that our presence there was counterproductive. If it were President Bush standing at the lectern at West Point warning of Qaeda plotting attacks, I would have dismissed it as fearmongering. But I've got to believe that Obama, in going through the methodical review that he did, came to the right conclusion, and he's got my trust, for now.

In the Q&A on Tuesday evening, a former Veterans Affairs official pointed out that Gen. David Petraeus was conspicuously in the audience at West Point, a positioning he said "pierces the dream" of the right that the architect of the Iraq surge would be their presidential candidate in 2012.

Another in the group who had worked closely with Hillary was struck by Obama's seriousness of purpose in reaching a decision that is both blatantly political in its adaptation to the 2012 election cycle and that contradicts what many of his supporters expected from a president swept into office by antiwar sentiment. Hillary's vote for the Iraq War opened the door to Obama's candidacy. If he had been in the Senate then, would he have made the decision he did as a state senator? A reflexive antiwar stance is easier to embrace when you're a candidate than when you're subjected to the cross-pressures of the presidency.

Eleanor Clift is also the author of Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics and Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment.