Remember that Oval Office interview President Bush did with Tim Russert that just didn’t work (or so was The Corner consensus, as I recall)? This speech this morning doesn’t compare at all—and had some good stuff about the progress we’ve made, in particularly. However, the depressing part about this (yes, I use this d-word a lot this morning) is that he is in front of a military audience. If you have CSPAN and such on in the office like we tend to here you see a lot of Bush speaking in front of military audiences. And he tends to rock. Feeds off the audience, they feed off him. I see none of that this morning. (The similarity to the Meet the Press interview being: I’ve seen him do so much better, performance wise.) Maybe it’s different on the scene, but it took the president a while to appear like he was really into this speech today, about an issue he cares so much about, the defining issue of his presidency. That’s depressing. I’d replay his Vet’s Day speech or National Endownment for Democracy speech from October instead of rewatching this one.