One speech, different takes: Obama @ West Point

A variation of the theme that beauty is in the eye of the beholder!

First, here is James Fallows, who leads it off with "I Like Ike" and names Eisenhower as the intellectual father of Obama's address:

The more significant point, to me, is how consistent Obama's argument was with one of the statements of U.S. interest and strategy that holds up best over time: Dwight Eisenhower's extraordinary "farewell address" to the nation nearly 50 years ago.

Next up, Will Inboden at FP who says this is not the candidate Obama of 2008:

President Obama's West Point speech on Saturday provides a great example of the structural continuities in American foreign policy. As president and commander-in-chief, Obama now embraces and owns policies that he previously eschewed. For example, after running his campaign denouncing the Iraq War and doubting the surge, he is now essentially declaring Iraq a victory ("this is what success looks like: an Iraq that provides no safe-haven to terrorists; a democratic Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.") After spending much of his first year in office downplaying if not ignoring democracy and human rights promotion, he is now making democracy and human rights promotion one of the four pillars of his national security strategy. After previously rhetorically distancing himself from American exceptionalism, he now says that a "fundamental part of our strategy is America's support for those universal rights that formed the creed of our founding."

Let us go for a third--to Peter Beinart, who calls it a clunker:

This weekend, for the second time in six months, President Obama flew to West Point to deliver a big foreign policy speech. And for the second time in six months, he delivered a clunker.

And then Beinart adds this:

Like Truman and the elder Bush, Obama is trying to limit America’s wartime goals, to define victory down rather than either going for broke or giving up. It may be a defensible strategy, but it’s not an inspiring one. And it’s not a strategy for which the American public is prepared to lose many lives. Perhaps the president should avoid West Point graduations for a while.

I tell you, life might be easier if I didn't read such competing arguments.  Ignorance has its advantages, I suppose.  But then, this is how we make mashed potatoes :)