By MARTIN SCHRAM, Scripps Howard News Service

Looking back, we can see how the Remarkable Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Barack Obama really began months ago, way back in November 2009.

Down in the top-secret depths of the White House Situation Room, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen led President Obama and a table full of officials through the long-awaited results of Pentagon's new war game, designed to predict outcomes of two troop strategy options in the once-won, then-neglected, now-grim Afghanistan War.

As President Barack Obama pursues his deliberately paced effort to forge the first comprehensive Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy after eight years of wandering war, Washington is taking it all calmly in stride.

Washington's problems seem not just humongous but beyond solutions -- from the economy to health reform to global warming, Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. But occasionally a controversy is thrust before us where we all know the right thing to do.

As America's latest wartime president reviews the grim but realistic assessment of his top war zone general--- and reshapes the military strategy that will become his legacy -- this much is certain:

The Vietnamization of the war in Afghanistan cannot, and will not, be an option.

Some issues are a demagogue's delight. And Democrats, thinking there really is safety in numbers, lemming-walked themselves into their opponents' trap and are now paying a steep political price because they ducked two health insurance reforms they could have resolved with just a bit of political courage and populist common sense.

On television screens in many but not all of America's schools, America's president spent less than a half hour Tuesday trying to inspire students who are used to being talked at by adults.

America gets a refresher in the lingo of labels every time senators launch an advise-and-consent ritual over a president's judicial nominee.

This week, as America marked the fourth anniversary of the natural disaster that devastated the city of New Orleans and the unresponsive presidency of George W. Bush, Washington's new team barely had time to notice.

The problem that President Obama was about to address was unconscionably big and growing worse: The huge backlog of Veterans' Affairs benefits claims filed by men and women who once fought America's battles -- only to discover they now must battle their own government, just to get what they already earned.