Some time ago, inspired by Ken Burns' PBS program on the Civil War, I read Shelby Foote's three-volume history of hat conflict. Oddly, in recent months the character of Gen. Braxton Bragg keeps coming to mind.
Bragg was the chief Confederate commander west of the Appalachians for a good part of the Civil War. His career had some solid successes: at Chickamauga he handed the Union army what some historians consider its greatest defeat. Before that he invaded the North and stayed longer than either of Lee's invasions. But his defeat at Chattanooga left the Union armies with an open road to Atlanta, which led inexorably to the fall of the Confederacy. And how does he remind me of President Obama?
One area where Obama the political leader more and more resembles Bragg the military leader is in the way both would start out well, but then their projects start to fall into disorganization and retreat. Many of Bragg's soldiers came to feel that under Bragg, every victory ended in retreat just like it was a defeat. I get the sense that many in this community are starting to have similar feeling about the President.
Foote gives an account of an exchange between Bragg and one of his generals.
"For God's sake, General, let us fight Buell [the Union commander] here"
"I will do it sir" Bragg replied
But he did not.
i can imagine modern versions of this exchange ringing through Beltway cellphones and through the WH meeting rooms.
Bragg was not a dud. He could have been a commander in the class of Sherman or Jackson. Foote gives an assessment that has an eerie ring of relevance today.
...the trouble, in fact, was personal, that it lay...somewhere down deep inside Bragg himself. For all the audacity of his conception, for all his boldness through the preliminaries, once the critical instant was at hand he simply could not screw his nerves up to the sticking point...It was as if a lesser poet should set out to imitate Shakespeare or Milton. With luck and skill he might ape the manner, the superficial arrangement of words and even sentences, but the Shakespearian or Miltonic essence would be missing. And so it was with Bragg.
And so it is with Obama.