Obama's second command performance of the week

I thought President Obama's speech to the Marines at Camp Lejeune today was almost as impressive as the address to Congress earlier this week. After all, his opposition to the Iraq war was what gave him his initial opening in the Democratic primary; today, as President, he had to explain how he would end the war without belittling his audience's service and sacrifice in it. He pulled it off with the perfect tone, drawing a distinction between the controversial decision to invade and the military's accomplishment of most of the various tasks it was assigned in Iraq.

The most impressive part of the Obama's speech, and the only part that really surprised me, was the thematic link to one of the central themes of his address earlier in the week, American's shared responsibility for the economic crisis, which he contrasted with the sacrifices made by the servicemen and women:

You make up a fraction of the American population, but in an age when so many people and institutions have acted irresponsibly, so many of you did the opposite. You volunteered to bear the heaviest burden.

To put it simply, he was a very credible Commander-in-Chief.

"Text of Obama's speech on the Iraq war" [MSNBC]
Video: "Combat Troops to Leave Iraq by August 2010" [C-SPAN]