Anyone expecting new or bold from President Obama's Sunday night Oval Office speech was surely disappointed. That was probably inevitable since the speech's timing seemed more dictated by politics and tanking poll numbers than any new policy initiatives. The President had been trailing the public mood and he had some catching up to do.
He identified last week's attack in San Bernardino as terrorism, a position most of the country had arrived at by Thursday. He even belatedly included Fort Hood in that definition, rather than the usual formulation of workplace violence. He also said that there was a problem within Islam, something most had concluded years ago, or at least that's what I took from his reference that "extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities." The President also joined consensus in saying that we are at war with ISIS and that "the terrorist threat has evolved into a new phase."
But if the President's description was trending in the right direction, his prescription was fairly static. Indeed, the bulk of the speech comprised the President cataloging what we have been doing, why it represented wisdom and why more robust action (described as being "drawn once more into a long and costly ground war," a proposal I have heard almost no one make) would be counter productive. It sounded a bit like the Oval Office equivalent of a beat cop chanting at a crime scene, "Nothing interesting to see here folks, move along." Curious, since on this very Sunday, veteran intel beat correspondent Kim Dozier reported a new Intel community consensus that ISIS is not contained and will spread globally and grow in numbers unless it suffers significant battlefield losses.
To be sure, the President promised to tighten up the visa waiver program and make it harder for those who have traveled to war zones to enter the United States. But he reserved the heaviest lifts for Congress, once again asking for a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (a good idea, if it is sufficiently robust), tighter gun control statutes (dead on arrival on the Hill) and outlawing gun purchases by those on the no-fly list (a popular position, but one that would not have affected Chattanooga, Fort Hood or San Bernardino and one that raises serious issues of denying Constitutional rights with very limited due process).
And then the President had a tasking for all of us, calling on us to avoid Islamophobia, a reminder that, I suspect, few beyond a Republican presidential candidate or two really needed.
The speech lasted thirteen minutes. The President was serious, calm and confident. I would have been more reassured, though, if occasionally he would have suggested that he could have been wrong and that he was actually willing to change course.
