Remember the drunken hordes chanting “O-BAM-A!”? That was SO 2008.

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America’s new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric — and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama’s speech would be well-received.

Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond “enthusiastically” to the speech. But it didn’t help: The soldiers’ reception was cool.

One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.

We all knew that the first huge case of buyer’s remorse was going to hit the Obama faithful last night, we just didn’t know it would travel across the Atlantic so quickly.

The ascension of Barack Obama during his campaign for the presidency was achieved with a lot of idealist rhetoric that any clear-headed observer could see didn’t have much real world application. But cults of personality like President Obama’s aren’t exactly known for their clear-headed thinking.

The realities of the job are pressing upon Obama and he’s beginning to realize that he can’t just show up, do his Fonzie act and hope that everyone gets so caught up in how cool he is that they don’t notice all of the pain in the ass real world stuff going on.

Now he’s doing the worst thing a war time president can do: he’s trying to throw everyone a bone. More than likely, this is because his need for adulation overrides much of his decision making. His “partial surge with an exit strategy that doesn’t include victory” approach is already showing signs of fallout on all sides.

There is a problem with electing the cool kid to do the world’s most difficult job and it’s about to start showing up more frequently. President Obama couldn’t completely commit to the effort in Afghanistan because it would alienate the very people who thrust him into prominence. It was, after all, his anti-war stance that helped him leave Hillary Clinton in the dust when she was already picking out drapes for the Oval Office. There wasn’t much else that separated them as candidates.

Now, when Obama uses language that’s more appropriate to the real world, he loses the Kos Kids. And the Germans.

It was as though Obama had taken one of his old campaign speeches and merged it with a text from the library of ex-President George W. Bush. Extremists kill in the name of Islam, he said, before adding that it is one of the “world’s great religions.”

Again, an attempt to appeal to everyone wears thin in a hurry:

It was a dizzying combination of surge and withdrawal, of marching to and fro.

Unfortunately, those of us who have known all along that Obama was never ready for this gig feel no vindication now. “I told you so” is neither satisfying or appropriate when we’re talking about the lives American troops.

The more that reality intrudes upon the Obama Cult of Personality, the more difficult it will be for the president to dismiss detractors with pithy catch phrases that his devoted sycophants in the American media dutifully repeat for him.

True, the European press was largely caught up in Obamamania last year. Non-American journalists, ironically, have more freedom to criticize this president.

Obama’s Magic No Longer Works

But in this case, the public was more disturbed than entertained. Indeed, one could see the phenomenon in a number of places in recent weeks: Obama’s magic no longer works. The allure of his words has grown weaker.

It is not he himself who has changed, but rather the benchmark used to evaluate him. For a president, the unit of measurement is real life. A leader is seen by citizens through the prism of their lives — their job, their household budget, where they live and suffer. And, in the case of the war on terror, where they sometimes die.

Political dreams and yearnings for the future belong elsewhere. That was where the political charmer Obama was able to successfully capture the imaginations of millions of voters. It is a place where campaigners — particularly those with a talent for oration — are fond of taking refuge. It is also where Obama set up his campaign headquarters, in an enormous tent called “Hope.”

In his speech on America’s new Afghanistan strategy, Obama tried to speak to both places. It was two speeches in one. That is why it felt so false. Both dreamers and realists were left feeling distraught.

We are now desperately in need of a war time president but find ourselves being led by a homecoming king.