He looks and sounds exactly the same in person.

Oh, by the way, I met the president last Friday. Well, I shook his hand. I just say "met" to make myself look important. He came to Camp Lejeune to deliver a big speech on Iraq. Thoughts:

1. I agree with his Iraq withdrawal timetable. The war is completely over in that country, so we should not be there anymore. We can't hold the Iraqis' hands forever.

2. I appreciated how he commended the military for accomplishing our task of toppling Saddam Hussein, then achieving our unexpected task of stabilizing the country to make way for a permanent government. I did not, however, appreciate how he left out the fact that we have devastatingly disrupted the worldwide terror network, defeated a full-blown insurgency in the heart of the Middle East, and made Iraq into the only fully democratic Arab state in the world. And he still seems allergic to the word "victory," but I think a lot of that is just lessons learned from Bush's "mission accomplished" speech. No matter what you really mean, it can always be taken the wrong way with things go south. Presidential CYA 101.

3. The biggest applause from the crowd came when he mentioned a pay raise for the military. It is, by the way, almost two percentage points less than the pay raises the past four presidents have given the military, but whatevs. If you joined the military for the money, you're stupid.

4. It was cool getting the opportunity to just see a president and members of his staff, people you normally only see on TV or read about. I was also very impressed with the presence of the Secret Service.

5. Female Marines were outrageously overrepresented in the risers behind Obama. In the main picture I saw coming from the news outlets, you saw Obama standing at the lectern, while directly behind him sat three females and one male. That could not have been an accident. There is probably one female for every 100 males in the Corps, and in some places you really have to search to find one. Females aren't even allowed in the combat element of the Marine Corps. And you don't just throw anyone up onto the stage with a president giving a major foreign policy speech. Some public affairs officer probably hand-picked the people who sat up there. But I'm not going to get into it any deeper, because I'd just get more pissed off and people would get offended.

6. I got this feeling during the speech that Obama didn't really understand the Marine's way of thinking about the war. I can't put my finger on it. Maybe it was his unfamiliarity with speaking before military audiences -- it was, after all, his first speech at a military base as president. I don't know. He delivered his speech in that perfect way that he's famous for, but it felt like he was just reading it. I think writer Tom Donnelly gets closer to what I'm trying to say:

Soldiers more easily see that we civilians are not like them; we civilians are mistakenly prone to think that soldiers are like us. For the president, the civilian who stands at the beginning of the chain of command -- who, by his constitutional authority as commander-in-chief really resides on the far side of the gap -- making the leap is an obligation, not an option. He, above all, should speak to his troops in the language of duty, honor, and country which is their native tongue but seems to be such a foreign dialect to a detached, cool, post-modern politician.