On August 17, 2009, President Obama addressed the Veterans of Foreign Wars:

“But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is a — this is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

This is either true or not true. If true, then winning the war in Afghanistan is fundamental to the defense of the homeland, and there can be no sacrifice too great. Because the last thing we want to be engaged in is a half-hearted, one foot in, one foot out, kind of war. If it is a war of necessity, then there is no question about giving the generals all the troops and equipment and support they need for as long as they need. America’s at war, dammit.

But David Brooks in this morning’s Times just blows past the basic question– do we need to win this war or not? Instead he dwells on Obama’s feelings and his level of determination. Brooks doesn’t believe Obama is really telling us the truth about how he feels about the war. He thinks the president needs to spend some quality time looking at himself in the mirror. “If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now.”

Actually, no. I don’t really care about President Obama’s feelings about the war. I care about his judgment. And if he says we must win this war, then we must win this war. If he’s changed his mind, then we need to have new goals articulated, and we need to achieve them. We can’t just increase or decrease troop levels depending on the president’s serotonin levels.

I do want to know more about what the President means when he says “Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.” I thought most of those plotters died in the attack, or have been caught or killed since, with the significant exception of Osama bin Laden himself. (How is it that this lunatic, flitting from cave to cave, supposedly on and off dialysis, under constant surveillance from our hundreds of millions of dollars of drones that cruise the area, is able to survive while the comparable uninsured American, during the same time period, has probably suffered the fatal consequences of our patchwork health-care system? Just asking.)

And I’m troubled about the basis for Tom Friedman’s judgment that we really don’t need to win the Afghan war. In the first place, Friedman was such a great champion for the Iraq pre-emptive war and then for repeatedly calling for staying the course “just another six months” that in many circles, six months is now simply referred to as a Friedman Unit. (At last count, the Iraq war, from March 19, 2003 to now has required 19 Friedman Units, soon to be a smooth 20 to 1 error in judgment.)

Now we have a new Friedman measure of progress in the world, from a column this week. Progress is now to be measured by “when a key player in the Middle East actually does something that puts a smile on my face.” Oh Oracle of Delphi, how far we’ve fallen! Somehow the idea that I’m going to be spending the rest of my life peering into that Friedman mustache trying to find traces of a smile makes me, how to put this delicately, have flashes of driving the big white bus.

Friedman blows past the basic question of whether or not we must win this war to keep America safe. Friedman gets the big questions completely backward: the real question seems to be not must we win, but how hard will it be to win: “We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.” So under Friedman’s logic we wind down the Afghan war even it means the possible destruction of America. Since it’s too hard to win. Gee, Tom. WWII was hard, too.

And that kind of logic ought to be enough to lower everyone’s serotonin levels.

Turns out that running a political campaign on a vague, all-inclusive slogan like “Hope” can be a dangerous game. For the idealistic among us, Obama’s call for us to unleash our hope meant unleashing that latent desire for a new kind of politics. For the needy, hope could mean emergency help right now, on the line.

“Hope for me is I’ll finally get a good job.”

“I’ll be able to get my teeth fixed.”

“I’ll be able to pay for my wife’s cancer therapy.”

Hope was intrinsically too big a promise to run on. Hope unleashes dreams of the beautiful, while politics by its nature can only deliver the truly ugly and barely functioning compromise. For anyone who dared, even for a moment, to let go of a sceptical frame of mind and give flight to hope, disappointment is inevitable. Reality can never catch up with all the dreams that hope unleashes. If any of those things that were once imagined arrive, they will certainly be bent out of shape, maybe beyond recognition.

How do you like your end of war, high speed rail, Wall Street reform so far?

That’s why hope is going to be replaced by a hope gap. Every time.

The nastiest of these hope gaps is coming early next year with the successful passage of health care legislation. Public option or not, Obama has given hundreds of millions of Americans reason to hope that the health care system will finally start working. The uninsured will be covered. Your doctor’s bedside manner will warm up. You’ll be able to get your teeth fixed. Chemo will be paid for. No more bankruptcies for medical bills. No more pre-existing conditions. No more turndowns from the insurance companies.

Our spirits will be lifted and hope will swell for many of us at that thrilling moment only a few months from now when President Obama gathers that huge crowd around him for the historic signing of the new Health Care For All legislation. Maybe it’ll be a few weeks after Thanksgiving, with the White House Christmas tree as a backdrop. Maybe Obama will be wearing a tasseled red cap. I can see Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and maybe even Olympia Snowe crowded around the same desk that F.D.R. once used to sign Social Security. Obama signs the documents and hands out the historic pens. The crowd cheers. A star rises in the East.

But it’s not going to happen that way. The real phase-in of health care change will take four years. Sure – the politicos are jockeying to move up some cosmetic talking points, but in cold (and it will certainly be cruel) reality the deaths from neglect, the bankruptcies, the denials of care will continue over the many years of phase-in. And if the media front-pages the continued horror stories while the uninsured and under-insured continue their suffering, hope will not only vanish, but health care reform will seem like a cruel hoax to those who will have been betrayed.

Obama, of course, will continue to be cool. Yes, the man is generally cool for all the right reasons. Unfortunately, we’re learning he can also be cool for some wrong ones.

Cool can be read as grace under pressure. Cool can be seen as smart, the calm of someone playing a deep game. But there is another side of cool, and when hope runs out for some, Obama’s cool will be read as condescension:

“I’m cool because I know things that are just too complicated to explain to everyone at this moment. I can make deals with big pharma – and I when I want you to know all the details, you’ll see how smart I was. In the meantime, be cool.”

What hope did Obama elicit in your heart during the campaign? Which of the many small and great wrongs of the Bush administration did you let yourself hope that Obama would somehow right? Big for me was torture. I believed we would shed a bright light on the evil perpetrated in our good name, and justice would be done. I’m sorry to report that I have entered my own little hope gap on torture.

And as far as your toothache that’s getting worse every day? Try not to lose hope.

I don’t idealize a great many people that I’ve known, but Richard Maddy is an exception. A violin maker, legendary string instrument rebuilder, WWII paratrooper, and son of the founder of Interlochen Center for the Arts, I met Richard when we were both serving on the alumni board of the organization his father had founded. When the board would get bogged down in the minutiae and politics of whatever problem had wound its way around us, Richard was always there to remind us what we supposed to be doing. He would ask, in some form or another, “Is it good for the kids?”

Richard is gone now, but I would like to know what helpful highly focusing question he might pose to help us think clearly about health care, as the debate (this is a debate?) gets louder, and we tend to lose sight of our goals here. Certainly one of Richard’s questions is helpful — “Is this good for our children?” But that question only gets to part of those affected. After all, this is about all of us, as individuals, as parents, as children, and as members of our local and national communities.

What simple and powerful questions can we agree on that will help us know when we’ve come up with the best possible solution to designing a health care system for America?

Those who are afraid that their Medicare might be taken away or compromised might want to ask the question, “Will Medicare be left alone?” Those who have health insurance but don’t want to pay additional taxes for anyone else’s healthcare might want to test any new plan by that threshold. Public health officials might want to ask how any new plan will affect the nation’s ability to deal with a biological attack or a natural pathogen-caused pandemic. We could add to the list of who should be asking these questions of self-interest, parents, college-age students, those without coverage at the moment, and other people who are concerned about how they will be affected.

The above groups of people, taken as a whole, are likely to ask questions and be satisfied with answers that reflect their self- or community health-interest. Some of these people will be focused on the greater good. Some will be focused on their immediate, one could say, more selfish interests. But whether enlightened self-interest or not, this would be the American people asking the questions that count.

Did I leave some groups out? Yes, indeed. I realize that the healthcare industry also has questions. Will be this be good for insurance companies? Will any change be good for hospitals? Will drug companies be able to set their own prices? What will be the impact on healthcare providers? And I would answer, I don’t think their questions are as important. Acting in our (the people’s) self-interest, we all want doctors to be happy, not overworked, and well-paid. We want hospitals to be efficient and clean, fully staffed, and pleasant places of nurture and recovery.

I’m willing to take it on faith that the pharmaceuticals, the insurance companies, the hospitals, and even the doctors, are going to take care of themselves. So when Big Pharma promises to take an $80 billion haircut out of the goodness of their hearts, or Karen Ignagni, lobbyist and spokesperson for the insurers says that now they’re going to stop denying coverage for “pre-existing conditions,” I think, thanks, Big Pharma. And thanks Karen, but I’m not all that into what you have to say right now. It’s a little late. What I do care about is that the National Academy of Sciences is reporting that 20,000 American’s die each year because they can’t get the healthcare they need.

And I am haunted by Oscar Wilde’s observation that, “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without creating a civilization in-between.” I had always hoped we could avoid that curse. Maybe this is when we get our chance.

So when I see talking heads, “experts,” and politicians talking about healthcare, I want them to answer the people’s, and only the people’s questions — “How will this change be good for me?” I want the people to be heard and answered, even though our questions might seem a little selfish. Make most of us happy, and just maybe, together, we can create something we could fairly call civilization.

I don’t go to the ballet all that often, but when I do the same thing always happens to me. By the time I get to intermission, I’m walking differently. Watching incredible dancers is a little contagious for me. I feel as if I’d like to do a grand jeté and maybe click my heels as I fly through the air. But one thing’s for sure — I’m standing a little taller. You just can’t slump after an hour of ballet.

Watching the Obamas glide through Europe this week I couldn’t help but notice that they were the center of attention wherever they went. There were a couple of particularly striking images that came back to us. First was the Obamas meeting the Queen and Prince Philip. The Queen looked tiny next to the Americans, and the royal husband looked as if he had stumbled into the wrong century. Something revolutionary had happened and he was downright wary.

The next image was of President Obama and Nicholas Sarkozy. Sarkozy is apparently more than a few millimeters shy of six feet, and must have been feeling a powerful vertical tug when he stood next to Obama. In the picture, his head is canted back almost as if in the hope that the height of his forehead will somehow improve things, but the effect reminds me more of when I’m out walking Tesla, our German Shorthaired Pointer and some little dog comes up. I don’t know why Tesla has this effect on little dogs, but they seem to have a huge need for her approval. Maybe it’s that they crave recognition that lowly as they are, they too are dogs, somehow ennobled by sharing dogness with our beautiful hound. Sarkozy was proud to be head of state too, sharing head-of-stateness with the magical President Obama.

I viewed and read a middling amount of coverage of the G-20 conference, and of other events in the UK and France this week, but no-one seemed to capture the essence of what the fact of Barack and Michelle Obama being the new first family of the U.S. means to the rest of the world. Yes, Obama faces a challenge similar to FDR’s, and he has a lot of Lincoln’s qualities, and he even has much of the megawatt charm and wit of JFK. Obama is like them, and he is completely different. He is an intellectual, a serious writer. He has wisdom. The speed at which he became comfortable with the weight of the office was astonishing, as if he had been preparing his entire life to bear the burden. His stride to a podium is more than just an athlete’s gate, it’s as if he, not Rahm, had been the dancer.

You see, I don’t think it’s just Sarkozy that Obama has up on their toes. I think its the G- 20, and all the other leaders he visits, and the populations of their respective countries, and most Americans, too.

Great leadership is transformative. Most of us are going to be beneficiaries of someone who just might be one of the greats. On your toes!