Obama: West Point speech most “emotional.” Really?

President Obama did the full hour on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” tonight. The bulk of the interview was about Afghanistan. Obama, who sat down with Steve Kroft before leaving for Oslo to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize, called his recent speech at West Point one of the most emotional of his career.

He also offered the most robust explanation so far of the dual, surge and withdrawal Afghan war plan.

Kroft: Why set a deadline? I mean, Senator McCain, most prominent.

Obama: Right. And the answer is that in the absence of a deadline, the message we are sending to the Afghans is, “It’s business as usual. This is an open-ended commitment.” And very frankly there are I think elements in Afghanistan who would be perfectly satisfied to make Afghanistan a permanent protectorate of the United States. In which they carry no burden. In which we’re paying for a military in Afghanistan that preserves their security and their prerogatives. That’s not what the American people signed off for when they went into Afghanistan in 2001. They signed up to go after al Qaeda.

The blog hates to be all theater critic about presidential interviews, but can’t help observing that they are so infrequent lately that Kroft was reduced to mostly letting Obama wax on about things rather than injecting much accountability.

Whatever — to each his own interview style. But it ended up being mostly a showcase of presidential thinking, rather than a journalistic exercise.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: It’s really a shame that I had to go through a whole 60 Minutes interview without talking about the gate crashers. (laughter) Good catch.

KROFT: You must know what happened. Can you share that with us?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think that what I know is what everybody knows. Which is that these people should not have gotten through the gate. A mistake was made at the checkpoint to let them through. That mistake was not corrected through the process. I think the Secret Service has already taken responsibility for it. I think there’s been an acknowledgement on the part of the White House that there should’ve been better coordination between Secret Service and the Social Secretary’s office. And it won’t happen again.

KROFT: Were you unhappy with your Social Secretary?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I was unhappy with everybody who was involved in the process, because obviously although I chafe at being in the bubble, I also want to make sure my family is safe. And that foreign guests of ours are safe. And so, it was a screw up. Now I will admit that, you know, this is a town where once a screw up happens, people can’t just say, okay, that was a screw up and let’s fix it. There has to be, you know two weeks worth of cable chatter about it. I don’t think that from a policy perspective, this was the most important thing or even the fifth or sixth most important thing that happened this week, although it got the most news.

Obama said he was seriously angry when he heard about the breach and added, “That’s why it won’t happen again.”