ANOTHER SLAM FOR OBAMA – AT 7:10 A.M. ET:   We've said before that the Brits are doing some of the best reporting on President Obama.  Now Tony Harnden, a sharp British observers of American politics, predicts that Mr. Obama will serve four years, period.  Harnden focuses on Bob Woodward's new book, "Obama's Wars," and how it portrays Obama the commander-in-chief: 

A president has no more solemn duty than that of being commander-in-chief. And judging from the evidence presented by Woodward, Barack Obama's view of that role is at best disquieting.

Nearly 100,000 American troops are now committed to Afghanistan but Obama's principal war aim is to withdraw and his main preoccupation is how the conflict plays domestically, particularly within his own Democratic party.

"This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan," Obama says at one stage. At another he declares that "everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint".

Obama comes across as viewing his generals with thinly-disguised hostility, while at the same time acquiescing to their proposals for the escalation of the Afghan war he so wants to avoid. His arbitrary drawdown of July 2012 was a signal to the Taliban to hang on because American commitment to success was lukewarm and time-limited.

The description of Obama staffers glorying in the firing of General Stanley McChrystal because they believed it boosted the president's macho credentials (it did the opposite) brings shame on the administration.

And...

In the meantime, Obama's Democratic allies on Capitol Hill are either running away as fast as they can from the president or curling up in the fetal position by postponing a congressional vote on whether to extend the Bush tax cuts – a move that makes them look both weak and cowardly.

For the first time, and despite the fact that no credible Republican candidate for 2012 has yet emerged, Obama is looking like a one-term president while one-party rule in Washington is in its death throes.

COMMENT:  You hear that buzz in political circles in the U.S., and in the buzz one can detect the name "Hillary." 

But don't count chickens please.  Both Reagan and Clinton were down after two years in office, and both came back to be reelected.  Obama is smart enough to enlist the people who can salvage his administration.  The problem is, he may not be smart enough to salvage himself.

I think one term is a clear possibility.

September 28, 2010