George Packer touched off a discussion yesterday with a comment suggesting that conditions in Iraq might be improving so much that Obama won't able to see through his ambitious withdrawal plan. This is very optimistic, to say the least, but even if Packer is right (and he almost certainly isn't), Obama sees the whole engagement as a bad strategic move, and is going to be able to make political headway by offering to shift the fight to Al Qaeda and Afghanistan.

Noam Scheiber makes a good point about the secondary effects of Obama's outreach to evangelical voters, but I think he's got his vocab wrong -- he calls it "pandering." But doesn't pandering imply a certain expediency, as though Obama wouldn't have delivered the best speech on religion in politics in years, or be spending today rolling out his plans for a "President’s Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships," except that he needs the votes? I think part of the reason Noam thinks this is a pander is the generally accepted but false idea that religious voters don't have a place on the left.