How’d that speech last week on Guantanamo work out for the president? Well, not so well — at least if he was looking to clamp down on the frenzy or solve the problem of what to do with the detainees. ABC News reports:

When Obama didn’t specify the mechanics for closing the prison, his allies were left scratching their heads and his critics asking why the need to shut it down, given that some of the prisoners were likely to go to scaled-down versions of Guantanamo anyway.

Well, you can’t say Obama isn’t bringing people together. Everyone from Sen. Jon Kyl to Sen. Dick Durbin (“Well, it was a mistake for us to entertain putting money — $80 million — in for the transfer of these detainees until the president’s plan was released”) to the media-deified Colin Powell thinks this is one big mess:

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican who endorsed Obama’s candidacy and has called for Guantanamo’s closing, also said Obama made a mistake.

“I think that’s the message that came out of Congress: We can’t give you $80 million,” said Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

“There’s a lot of internal home resistance to bringing these people into the country. So you come forward with a plan that makes some sense and you tell us how you’re going to resolve all of these cases and do it in a way that we can support and then maybe we can move forward. So I think it was premature to ask for the money,” Powell said.

This is what comes from political grandstanding, from declaring your predecessor to be derelict or ethically defective in not snapping his fingers to solve a problem. This is what comes from decrying 300 million Americans and 90 senators as hysterical. And this is what comes from not being a serious commander-in-chief. It is a hard lesson about the consequences of mistaking a campaign slogan for national security policy.  We can only hope the president will take it to heart — and not repeat his mistake.