From last night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On Obama’s falling approval rating on his handling of Afghanistan:

Well, I think a lot of slippage in the polls is Democrats.
Let’s remember how all of this happened. During the Bush years, the Democrats inflated the importance of Afghanistan and pretended it was the “good war,” the war that had to be won, even, as Obama said just a month ago, a war of necessity–as a way to oppose the Iraq war and not appear to be entirely antiwar, as the Democratic reputation was ever since the Vietnam days.
It was a cynical political maneuver. Bob Shrum, who was a high advisor in the Kerry campaign five years ago, admitted that it was a political move as a way to oppose the Bush war, but not be antiwar.
Well…the Democrats are in control, and they have a president who understands that it is an unpopular war and infinitely more difficult war than Iraq is because it was never a country, it’s extremely decentralized, it has a very weak central government and a huge amount of corruption. But he stuck with it.
So what has happened is his troops, meaning his political troops–Democrats, the rank and file– who in the Bush days were ostensibly in favor of the war, are now open about their opposition. And he’s losing his constituency on the left and in the center and even some on the right.

On General McChrystal’s strategy for Afghanistan:

McChrystal is proposing an Afghan surge. This is a complete recreation of what happened in Iraq in ‘06, ‘07, ‘08. We were at a low point in public opinion at the time, and elite opinion was entirely against the surge in Iraq.
Bush made the most courageous and correct decision of his entire presidency in insisting on it– against the polls. And what happened is that surge succeeded in saving a lost war.
In Afghanistan the idea is this: We have a bridge, a surge, which would [last] a year or two, during which you build up the Afghan army to perhaps a quarter of a million, which would be able, if it succeeds, to then, with little Western support, keep the capital, protect the capital, make deals with the warlords in the north, and contain the Pashtun insurgency in the south. That’s all that we can hope.
But if you don’t have a surge for a year or two where the West steps in and creates an Afghan army, we are going to have helicopters [taking off from the roof of] the embassy in Kabul.

On whether the New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races point to a national GOP comeback:

Well, when you’re way ahead and you think you are going to win, then you make it [off year elections] extremely important and national and predictive–which was always nonsense.
I think what is really interesting is how un-nationalized these races have become. And, as we heard, all of these issues are local–charges of corruption in New Jersey, actually, two-way charges, and [Bob McDonnell’s] thesis in Virginia. You can’t get more local and personal than an attack on that basis.
At the beginning of the year when Obama was riding high, he had the wind at his back, of course he was incredibly popular, it looked as if they would be, again, national races in which Democrats had the advantage, again, running against Bush.
Here we are six months later. Obama has declined. The sheen is off. The magic is gone. And his numbers are at about 50 percent. What has happened is that Obama’s decline has made these into local races again. The great trends, the Democratic sweep of last year is now over. It has been neutralized.
And the races will end up fought on petty issues like theses 20-years-old.