THE BITTER TEA OF THE UNICORN RIDER?:

The President's Frank Capra Moment (David Shribman, 10/18/09, Real Clear Politics)

Now, as the Obama era unfolds, there increasingly is less patience for the familiar arguments that the war in Iraq started in obfuscation, that the conflict in Afghanistan was ignored for too long, that a lethal combination of lax regulation and laissez-faire fever pushed the economy to the brink, and that Iran spun out of control, while Americans focused on lesser threats in the region. All that might be true, but it can no longer be part of the Obama repertoire.

Several factors combined to produce the president's Frank Capra moment.

One of them surely was the 66-page report on Afghanistan produced by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, whose recommendations for the war in Central Asia would put the Obama administration on a far different footing. The McChrystal report is forcing Obama to make a decision -- carry on or change course -- and thus already has helped brand the war as Obama's, a notion that was fed last week when PBS aired a Frontline show called "Obama's War."

One of the factors was the president's reappointment of Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. That gave Obama's seal of approval to the prescription, written primarily in the Bush years, for ending the recession. The result is that the Bernanke way is no longer the Bush way, but the Obama way.

So, too, with the recent meeting with top Iranian officials on the nuclear weapons issue. Iran is officially an Obama problem, not an inheritance from Bush.