Packer, Frum on Obama's Afghanistan Speech

George Packer of The New Yorker and David Frum of The Frum Forum offered similar responses to President Obama's speech announcing his strategy for Afghanistan.

Packer called it "the least rousing, most skeptical call to arms I’ve ever heard."

Obama spoke of limits—the limits of American money, power, time, attention, of our ability to bend the world to our will—as much as of possibilities...But the sober description of the box America finds itself in and of the compromises and trade-offs involved in his search for a way out was truer and, perhaps, braver. It also spoke honestly to the country’s mood, after eight years of war and domestic neglect, with a prospect of long-term decline...Watching and listening, I admired Obama’s refusal to offer the slightest bit of false comfort. I decided that, given all the constraints and uncertainties and pressures and risks, he has set out on the least awful path. And I feared for his Presidency, and for the rest of us, too.

Frum responded similarly.

In preferring Eisenhower as his exemplar rather than Churchill, Obama sounded exactly the right, reassuring note. Don’t worry, he was saying to the American public, I won’t lose sight of larger goals. The costs of an intensified commitment to Afghanistan have been carefully weighed and considered; hopes for success have been realistically assessed.

If President Obama’s speech can mobilize the public to endurance and patience, it will count as a success, even without stirring clips to replay before the endlessly fluttering electronic flags over the shoulders of the cable pundits. Who would understand that better than the actual Winston Churchill, who devoted much of his last prime ministership to the successful quelling of an insurgency in Malaya – without delivering a single memorable speech?

It is striking to me that two thoughtful, well-spoken voices of frequently opposite political orientation were similarly comforted to hear the President speak on a serious and complex matter to the nation as if it were inhabited by grown-ups.

--Ballard Burgher