He's not Bush.
He's never stood in a flight suit under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished"
He's actually ramped down foreign deployments, not just planned to do it.
He's proactively involved special forces in trouble spots before full scale deployments become necessary.
He's just a figurehead in front of a much larger machine that makes his decisions for him - well, o.k., on that one he is just like Bush.
But, the machine that Obama represents, corrupt, inconsistent, and self-serving as it is, seems to be an improvement over the machine that Bush represented. Now, if we can get an improvement over Obama next time, we can call ourselves an enlightened, empowered electorate, at least for a few years.