Correction: Trey Treviño’s November 19th column “President Obama: The man no longer” incorrectly stated that American troop levels in Afghanistan might soon approach those present at the height of the Vietnam War. This inaccurate statistic was taken from the British newspaper The Guardian, which has since issued a correction. The Daily Campus thanks Will McElgin for bringing this issue to our attention.

Two or three years ago, I thought Barack Obama was the man.

He just kind of came out of nowhere and started criticizing everything about the Bush administration and Congress and what they had all done wrong with this country and the Middle East.

Granted, it was all after the fact and he could safely call them out because he hadn’t been a senator at the time and therefore had a built-in high horse, as he never had to deal with what any of what the rest of the Senate had to deal with. I mean, Obama has admitted that he doesn’t know whether or not he would’ve signed the Patriot Act, since he wasn’t there and couldn’t feel what those other congressmen felt.

But, essentially, Obama was awesome, and I hoped he would become president one day and fix everything.

As the years dragged on, however, I realized more and more that being able to run his mouth didn’t actually make Obama more qualified to run this country than anyone else, especially no more than the incredibly seasoned veteran of politics, as well as the literal battlefield, John McCain.

Subsequently, I grew more and more apathetic to who would win. I still voted for Obama, but only because Hillary Clinton lost the primaries (yes, I voted for Clinton!), and because I felt like I was sending a message to the Bush Administration, which I still hate.

As a president, Obama really hasn’t been that bad. I mean, he hasn’t really improved the state of the union per se, but I understand that the union was in a rather horrendous state, and these kinds of things take time, certainly longer than the one year he’s had thus far.

Aside from that, he’s been pushing health care reform, he seems to have a desire to shut down Guantanamo Bay, and he’s even been critical of Israel from time to time, which to my mind indicates that maybe he isn’t a complete jerk, which is what politicians usually end up becoming no matter how great they are.

Yes, on the whole, Obama hasn’t disappointed me all that much.

Until recently, that is, when I read his latest press release and discovered that he apparently wants to send more troops to Afghanistan. While I applaud his ability to remember that we are actually fighting a war in Afghanistan, I was most shocked to find that the number of troops stationed there has the capacity to match the number of troops stationed in Vietnam during the peak years of the war.

Obama plans on unveiling his ultimate strategy soon, and was quoted as saying, “I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we’re doing, how we’re going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost.”

“How we’re going to succeed.” That phrase worries me. Already our little war with Afghanistan has the very real capacity to overtake the one in Vietnam in length (just a few more years), and there really doesn’t appear to be any clear end to it. Maybe we won’t leave until we find Osama bin Laden, or maybe we won’t leave until we can “fix” the country. Either way, neither of those goals has a clearly definable plan or timeline, and it’s conceivable that we’ll never leave. If that happens, make no mistake: It will blow up in Obama’s face, he will lose all credibility, and all his plans for fixing our own country will completely fall apart.

Some may think that there’s no way someone as smart as Obama could let that happen. But you know what? It happened to LBJ, and he was a smart guy with dreams of his own; it can certainly happen again.

President Obama, I hope beyond all hope that you know what you’re doing.

Trey Treviño is a sophomore CTV major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].