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The vanishing liberal:

How the left learned to be helpless

By Kevin Baker

On the first day of December last year, Barack Obama stood before the assembled Corps of Cadets at West Point and announced his decision to send another 30,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan. The president’s nationally televised address was, in many ways, the most honest speech made to the American people by their leader in a generation. Obama conceded that our client state in Afghanistan “has been hampered by corruption” and “has moved backwards.” He told us he had rejected “a more dramatic and open-ended escalation” of the war because that would require setting “goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests.” He called on the nation to restore “the connection between our national security and our economy,” since “our prosperity provides a foundation for our power,” which means therefore that “our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended—because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.”

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SEE ALSO: Obama, Barack; Career as U.S. president; Civil rights movements; Democracy; Helplessness (Psychology); Liberalism; Military leadership; Military policy; 2009-; New Deal, 1933-1939; Populism; Progressivism (United States politics); Right and left (Political science)

Response: June 2010, page 4 · June 2010, page 4

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