From last night’s All Stars.

On Obama’s $75 billion mortgage plan:

I think the content looks reasonable-it’s risky but reasonable.
The system is at stake, and I have argued for long that if you’re going to help the bankers at the top of the system, you are going to want to also attack the problem at the base, which is the mortgage holders.
But the problem I have with Obama is not the plan itself, but the way he packages and presents. He is always on the stump. He is always promising.
Look at what he said-”The program will not reward folks who bought homes that they knew from the beginning they would never be able to afford.”
Now, that obviously is a statement that can’t be true. How are you going to ascertain if somebody purchased a house knowing in advance he couldn’t afford it? Are you going to put him before an A-Rod press conference? Are you going to have them sit before the Illinois House Impeachment Committee?
Maybe we bring them all to Guantanamo, which is going to be empty, we’re told, and have good interrogations there.
He is making a promise he knows is a false one. He does it because it garners applause, as it did today, and because it’s demagogic.
It’s a good plan, but I wish he would stop campaigning and govern in a way that doesn’t overpromise, as he is wont to do.

On Obama’s announcement of a troop buildup in Afghanistan:

When President Bush announced the surge in Iraq, he did it on prime time television. And this was a press release. The president spoke about it only in speaking to Canadian television, an odd way to announce a significant event.
I think the reason is that he understands he has to lower expectations in the war in Afghanistan. It was politically opportune when he ran for the presidency to attack the Bush administration for its emphasis on Iraq, “the wrong war.” Afghanistan was going to be “the good war.”
He didn’t know that the Iraq war would essentially end before he became president, and he would be left with Afghanistan.
And now he knows that it’s a grim assessment. It’s not essentially winnable the way Iraq is, and he will have to have his troops for all of his, at least, first term, in what is essentially a stalemate. It’s not a happy prospect, and that’s why it’s all being under-spoken, underplayed and being extremely low key about it.