I have to believe that there is *something* good about Obama.

Well, there's one very large thing, which is that the people who work for him don't suck.

That doesn't sound like much but it's a big deal, especially compared to his predecessor.

Whatever we may say about the Iraq occupation, it has changed tremendously in the last 6 months, and for the saner. For the first time we are actually overseeing something that looks vaguely like rebuilding what we blew up so we can give it back to the people who own it. And we finally got rid of using Saddam's old palace as our embassy!

Obama actually has an economic policy. He's not just staggering around like a drunken frat boy. If an American city were hit by a world-shattern storm today, there would actually have been emergency planning going on and there would be an actual real response.

It's remarkable how quickly Obama got money out to all those "shovel-ready" construction projects. That was an organizational feat that no Bush could have matched.

So he's got all that going for him. Now if only there weren't such a thing as enemies in the world — enemies who hate you — he could just relax and manage.

And maybe he'll get his way yet.

I know a few who were so taken by Barack and Michelle and the girls. So trusting that he stood for exactly what they believed in.

It's the trust that gets me. Who in their right mind just trusts a politician to do anything? Lobbyists of every stripe, from non-profit to all-profit, make their living out of the understanding that politicians have never and will never do anything they aren't under some kind of pressure to do, right then at that moment.

As a wise and ancient philosopher-king[1] once said, "Trust.. but verify."

1. Okay, okay, it was Ronald Reagan.

A straw is right. Obama is basically trying to extricate the US from Afghanistan while leaving something more behind us than just rubble. He is, as Koppelman points out, simply doing what he said he would do.

In that respect he is showing greater consistency than what we all might have hoped for in his other positions.

But the thing about Obama is that he has always been a manager at heart. He's happy building consensus and winning over intractable sides. It's a great personality to have for certain roles, and I'm sure that we will have a chance to appreciate it as a virtue on some other issue.

But where that kind of instinct for the middle ground is really especially bad is during a crisis. Clinton had the same problem but the 1990s were a relatively tranquil period and so his sins of overfriendliness were venal by comparison.

Koppelman is right on the money in assessing Obama's policy as being one intended to half-please everyone, but thereby fated to please no one. That is the risk inherent in being Obama.