And it was only last year that foreign-policy maven Sarah Palin decreed on Facebook that the terrorist threat calls for a commander in chief, not a professor. Yet we have barely heard a word from Palin, or from most of her party brethren, since it became clear that as a war-on-terror president, Obama has more in common with Tony Soprano than with Mr. Chips.
The president's 2011 kill list includes Osama bin Laden (by bullets), al-Qaeda international operations chief Atiyah Abd al-Rahman (by drone in Pakistan), and, last month, the American-born cleric and al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki (by drone in Yemen, along with the American-born al-Qaeda extremist Samir Khan).
Obama is launching many such drones without seeking the permission of the host countries, much less apologizing for them. In his first two years, he authorized four times as many drones as George W. Bush did during his entire second term.
Which is why the traditional Republican rhetoric - such as Rudy "9/11" Giuliani's warning that a Democratic president would endanger America by "going on defense" - now seems as outmoded as the audiocassette.
Yet even though Obama has erased that GOP story line by "making his bones" on national security (as Tony Soprano might put it), he can't seem to nudge his poll numbers northward. That's clearly because voters are far more focused on economic insecurity.
It speaks volumes about the zeitgeist that although Obama defies the Democratic stereotype - the latest Washington Post-ABC News survey found 62 percent of Americans, and nearly that share of independents, like the way he has handled terrorism - he scores a dismal 43 percent job-approval rating. At this point, most people seem fine with his leadership abroad, but they feel he hasn't led effectively at home, where the threat of job loss or foreclosure seems more real than that of al-Qaeda.
