A number of observers have remarked on the tone of the speech, which was typical of Obama — cold, removed, stern, and unfeeling. Peter Beinart thinks the surge is good policy but complains that the speech “left me cold”:

Militarily, we are plunging deeper into Afghanistan, but emotionally, we are getting out. There was virtually nothing in the speech about our moral obligation to the Afghan people, a people to whom America promised much and has delivered scandalously little.

It was, as Beinart puts it, “the opposite of rousing.”

On one hand, this is the temperament issue in full flower. What was attractive during the campaign, a steely and cool reserve, is, in a president, off-putting and sometimes downright weird. We keep waiting for the president to warm up, and it’s not going to happen, I think.

But part of the explanation was provided by Obama himself. He’s just not that into anything other than his Left-leaning domestic agenda. He told us:

But as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power.  It pays for our military.  It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry. And it will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last. That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended — because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own [emphasis added].

He couldn’t have been clearer — he can’t devote whatever it takes for as long as it takes because he has other things to do. We can hope he doesn’t mean it. We can hope the military works very fast to get the job done before the president tires. But we are kidding ourselves if we ignore the limitations and preferences of this president. He is president during a war. But he resists being a wartime president. We can only hope and pray that changes.