Published for The Enterprise Blog, September 1st, 2010:

The speech last night had the feel of a mini-State of the Union address, and not a good one at that. The president talked not only about Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Middle East peace, education, energy, jobs, competitiveness, manufacturing, and veterans policy. It is hard to effectively cover all those topics in an hour-long State of the Union address; it is virtually impossible to do so in a 18-minute address to the nation.

The pivot to the economy was not only awkward, but revealing. President Obama rarely talks about the war on terror. This is an abdication of one of his principal responsibilities as commander in chief—to explain our mission, lay out the stakes, and rally the country to victory. When he finally takes a moment to meet that responsibility and deliver a high-profile address on the war, he cannot resist the temptation to turn it into a speech about his domestic agenda.

The president said that addressing his domestic priorities “must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president.” In fact, his “central responsibility as president” is to defend the country. And his failure to recognize this points to a central difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush saw that his highest responsibility was to prevent another attack on our country—by defeating the terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, and by defeating their hateful ideology by advancing the hopeful alternative of human freedom. President Obama does not see any of this as the central mission of his presidency. His central mission is to transform America—and the war on terror is a burden and a distraction from that mission.

Full post here