Much was made of the president’s infrequent personal contact with his commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. As a result, while embarrassing himself in Copenhagen, Obama did manage to slip in less than half an hour of a chat with McChrystal. But, not to worry, we’ve been told: McChrystal sends him lots of memos.

Unfortunately, Obama’s relationship, if this report is to believed, isn’t that much better with Gen. David Petraeus. In the Obama administration, “General Petraeus’s relationship with Mr. Obama is nothing like his bond with Mr. Bush.” And we don’t see Petraeus on the Hill or out explaining our mission to the American people. Instead he’s laying low and fending off speculation that he might run for president in 2012.

All this leaves open the question as to where Obama’s military experts’ strategic advice is coming from. Unlike his opponent in the presidential campaign, the president lacks military or any significant national-security experience of his own. Who then has his ear and what knowledge are they imparting? Well, Joe Biden is very vocal. (This is not comforting, given Biden’s track record on Iraq, to those who would like to get Afghanistan right.) Perhaps sensing that he was too low on gurus and too short on any military support to reject McChrystal’s recommendation,  Obama recently made a big show of bringing in Colin Powell — who used to be in favor of using overwhelming force (he had a doctrine named after himself about not trying to fight wars on the cheap or without adequate troops) but now is among the “skeptics” of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan. (Powell wasn’t game on the surge either, so he gets some points for consistency.)

It’s not exactly an impressive display of expertise for a president who was going to assemble the best and the brightest in order to get the very best advice, stripped of ideology and politics. Sure enough, National Security Adviser James Jones is dispatched to assure us that politics has nothing to do with the second- and third-guessing by the White House. (We can stipulate that when a high-level adviser has to explain that its war-planning isn’t about politics, the White House has a problem.) It would be nice to hear what the substantive argument and supporting experience is for rejecting the pending and now back-burnered advice Obama has received from Admiral Mullen and Gens. Petraeus and McChrystal.

The Democrats and their cheerleaders in the punditocracy used to scream for President George W. Bush to listen to his generals. Then Bush got better generals, listened to them, and avoided defeat in Iraq. Obama, it seems, is bent on ignoring his generals. If he takes the advice of Joe Biden instead of those expert on counterinsurgency (and with a track record of getting war strategy right), the results may be disastrous not only on the battlefield but also in the court of public opinion. The public already trusts the generals more than Obama to make decisions about Afghanistan. And if Obama — based on nothing more than “I changed my mind” — rejects the advice of his military commanders, the public may wonder what exactly motivates the commander in chief and whether the best and the brightest military minds were hired just for show.

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