Obama Faces War Without His Base

It was reassuring to see a Democratic president admit that we're "in a real struggle with bad people," writes Peggy Noonan of Obama's Afghanistan speech, but it's too bad his supporters don't seem to be on board. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush had a political base that would rally round them after war speeches but Obama, uniquely, appears to be going it alone, Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal.

Obama was denounced by many after the speech, Noonan notes, but the Afghanistan problem is so complex that any president offering any strategy from full withdrawal to tripling troop levels would have taken flak. "Will the American people, on this issue, decide to become his base?" Noonan asks. "In the end what they decide will likely determine the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan."
(More Afghanistan speech stories.)