So which is the real Barack Obama: West Point or Oslo? Dud or dude? After the excruciatingly awkward speech at the military academy this month justifying his Afghanistan policy – a performance that seemed to torture both logic and, from the look of his body language, himself – the hacks were reaching for dimissives to write off the 44th president. Supreme orator of our time? Not that contortionist, simultaneously going gung-ho and heading for the exit.
The setting seemed only to lay bare the self-consciousness of what Mr Obama was doing: trying to sell the least doomed of all the Afghanistan options. Occasionally, the camera would relent from the president's stolid demeanour and pan across the faces of the cadets in grey. Most had a weirdly far-away look, even though what was being discussed concerned, as Mr Obama acknowledged, their own lives and deaths. After all those months of deliberation, was this prosaic utterance the pay-off?
Unworthy thoughts surfaced. Maybe the Rhetoric B Team had written this one? Were all those references to “no blank cheque”, to rebuilding the nation at home, to the unpersuasive deadline of a mere 18 months before the Afghanisation of the war merely a sop thrown to the anti-war cohorts in his own party? Was this speech a product of anxious political calculation rather than statesman-like thoughtfulness and courage?