Now, having spent some more time with the Obama speech, I’m not any less appalled than I was at first blush. But it has one striking resemblance to a Bush speech — its unwarranted, overly optimistic generalizations about what people want. With Bush, everyone in the world was, just a little bit beneath the surface, a freedom-loving democrat. With Obama, everyone is a peace-loving multilateralist. “The yearning for peace is universal,” Obama said. Of course, so is the yearning for war, or it wouldn’t be endemic to human existence. Speeches like this are always going to be aspirational, but is it really too much to ask that U.S. presidents be a little more modulated, sociologically humble, and realistic?