I had a seat in the audience yesterday for former Vice President Richard Cheney’s speech on the threat to the United States of terrorism, on methods used to interrogate captured terrorists during the Bush years and on the Obama Administration’s release of documents detailing those methods.  It was at the American Enterprise Institute here in Washington.  Before Mr. Cheney spoke, AEI projected in the room the broadcast of President Obama’s speech on the same subject.  This morning’s reports generally scored the exchange as a win for Mr. Cheney.  That wasn’t the half of it.  After watching the back to back, nationally televised addresses, I thought, what were those guys at the White House thinking?

For perhaps the first time since his race for the presidency began, Mr. Obama looked badly off his game.  While speaking with his customary grace, he was at times repetitious, as if he really wanted you to get his point.  During several passages of the text, his voice conveyed a note of stridency.  Worse still, in answering critics of the document release, he asserted that knowing the specifics of interrogation techniques would not help captured terrorists resist questioning, as those techniques would not be used again.  Moments later, Mr. Cheney noted that, in his order banning those methods, Mr. Obama had reserved to himself the right to order the methods employed in the presumably rare instances that he deemed it necessary.  This was exactly the policy of the Bush Administration, where so-called waterboarding was used on a total of three prisoners out of hundreds captured.

Similarly, Mr. Obama insisted that Congressional and judicial oversight would be honored and strengthened.  Mr. Cheney replied that in the Bush years key members of Congress had been briefed and consulted, but it hardly needed to be said that when the political winds changed, at least one prominent Democratic member, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, became like Sergeant Schultz of the old TV comedy Hogan’s Heroes, repeating over and over, “I knew nothing.”

Finally, Mr. Obama’s decision to find facilities to hold some of these prisoners elsewhere outside of the U.S. and Mr. Cheney’s call for the Obama Administration to release what was learned as a result of using the methods in question, belied Mr. Obama’s claim that  Bush policies were a “mess.”

In other words, yes, the commentators are right: Mr. Obama came out on the short end of this one.  But here is “what were they thinking” issues really kick in:

• According the Mr. Cheney, the White House decided to schedule their speech from the National Archives AFTER the announcement of Mr. Cheney’s speech.  They booked the President to start at the same time Mr. Cheney spoke.  Predictably, Mr. Cheney waited for Mr. Obama to finish, then took the podium.  In effect, Mr. Obama became Mr. Cheney’s warmup act, building a vastly larger television audience for the former Vice President and insuring side by side front page coverage throughout the world.  What were they — those at the White House — thinking?  They could have waited for the next day, or that afternoon, if they wanted to hit the news the same day.
• The President is caught in the same web that has enmeshed  Speaker Pelosi.  The Left wing of his party gives no credibility to the threat organizations like Al Qaeda pose to the United States.  Mr. Obama made lots of promises to the denialists during his campaign.  But he has now seen the intelligence and received the briefings, and if he ever truly believed the threat that the terrorists, including those in Guantanamo, pose was chimerical, he has surely been disabused of that view by now.  So his “change” is in key ways not much of a change — and in moving the prisoners held in our Cuban outpost to maximum security facilities inside the U.S. itself, an extremely unwelcome one in proposed host states.  What was the White House thinking rising to Mr. Cheney’s bait and highlighting its contradictory policy in a manner that invited batting down.

It was great fun sitting in one of the two live audiences, watching the Obama-Cheney exchange.  But as the day wound up, I remained puzzled by the White House’s ineptness.  This morning’s lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal said that Mr. Obama’s “speech and the other events this week look more like a vindication of the past seven years.”  This is not a bad thing.  In the early stages of the Cold War, Republicans were vociferous in their skepticism about the Truman policy of containment.  Then Eisenhower took office and continued that approach, not out of partisan considerations, obviously, but because it fit the imperatives of national security.  Mr. Obama isn’t as deeply versed in national security matters as was President Eisenhower, but he is a realist.  In policy he appears to be bowing to reality.  In communications… well in communications, one still walks away, shaking one’s head, asking, “what were they thinking?”