From last night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On Obama’s liberal base expressing frustration with him:

Yes, [the Left is upset] for understandable reasons. There is rendition, which he [Obama] has kept. He has kept detention without trial.
And it is what he hasn’t done. He hasn’t enacted the agenda of the Left — for example, the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which he could do by executive order; the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, as an example.
And I think what is happening is that the Left, which had looked at him as kind of a messianic redeemer, has decided that he is a calculating politician.
[But] it is not as if he is more of a centrist than we would imagine. He’s not. He is a man of the Left. He would like to enact all this, but he can’t.
The reason is that he is in the middle of the struggle of his life over health-care reform. If he loses on this, he loses all authority and he loses the future of his presidency. And to pass that, he needs the center.
He has the Left. The Left has nowhere to go. They are never going to have a president more to the left than Obama, and they know it. So if you have to choose between the constituency that you have in your pocket and one that you could lose, namely, the Blue Dog Democrats — if you start a fight on the Defense of Marriage Act or if you start a fight in the middle of a war on “don’t ask, don’t tell,” or if you start a fight on health care where you insist on the public option knowing that you might lose the whole Senate on that — Well, it’s obvious which way he is going to go, and that’s the way he has gone….
It’s analogous to what the Bush administration did in its early days where it went along with a lot of liberal stuff on education, inflating the budget, no vetoes, passing all kinds of expensive programs and entitlements because the Bush administration wanted all the support it could get on the war and the war-related issues…But it [thus] forfeited its …freedom of action on the social issues and ideological issues, and that’s happening with Obama. Health care is his equivalent of the Bush administration’s need for support on the wars.
If he gets it, he’ll be strong again, and perhaps he will [then] enact a left-wing agenda on social issues.

On Joe Biden’s role in the debate over Afghanistan:

I think it’s hard to believe this sudden media inflation of the wisdom of Joe Biden is accidental.
It’s clear that there is a debate inside the White House.You got McChrystal, a man of incredible authority and stature, who says you’ve got to go this way with a heavy troop involvement, and you’ve got Petraeus, the man who saved Iraq, saying the same, saying otherwise we’re going to lose.
And the administration obviously is resisting, and it has to have a champion of the other side, and it’s the hapless vice president. So some way you have to inflate his status and to make it at least somebody that will be [seen as] a credible alternative.
I’m not sure that the Biden plan is a plan. It’s an idea, and the administration obviously, in its leaks, is tending towards the Biden idea. But it needs to have some stature on that side, and that’s why I’m little bit skeptical about the [sudden] discovery of the vast storage of military wisdom in a guy [who], if you remember, opposed the Gulf War and opposed the surge and supported the Iraq war, which he now says was one of the great mistakes of American history — 0 for 3.