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At a time when our political system is said to be incapable of rising above poisonous partisanship to promote the national interest, Gen. David Petraeus’s visit to Capitol Hill last week was instructive.

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What — you didn’t know Petraeus was in town for make-or-break hearings on President Obama’s Afghanistan policy? Well, in a way that proves the point.

In September 2007 Petraeus returned from Baghdad at a comparable moment in the Iraq war. The week he was in town Iraq filled 42 percent of the newshole monitored by the Pew Research Center’s News Coverage Index — mostly with stories that Petraeus is unlikely to want in his scrapbook.

A full-page MoveOn.org ad branded him “General Betray Us.” Protesters jeered him and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton said that Petraeus’s claims of progress were not credible.

Like Iraq then, the Afghanistan war today is unpopular; the president has ordered a surge in U.S. troops that has aroused skepticism; and most Americans want U.S. troops home.

Yet Petraeus’s appearances last week, this time accompanied by Defense Undersecretary Michle Flournoy, could hardly have been more different.

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin (Mich.), kicked off the week by saying that Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy had been “instrumental in turning the tide in Afghanistan.” The panel’s ranking minority member, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), agreed: “We are turning around the war in Afghanistan.”

On the House side it was the same story, but with the Republican going first. “Our forces have made significant gains in the past year and have reversed the Taliban’s tactical momentum,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.). “I want to start by concurring with the chairman’s remarks about the progress that has been made in Afghanistan in the last year to 18 months,” said ranking Democrat Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.).

Many members went on to probe aspects of U.S. policy, often skeptically, just as you’d hope legislators would: about Afghan corruption, Pakistani instability, suicide prevention and brain-injury treatment, the war’s high cost in lives and money, and the perceived free-riding of allies. But the questioning was respectful and directed at improving U.S. policy, not proving that it had failed.

There are many reasons for the contrast. Historic events from Japan to Libya overshadow news from Kandahar. Petraeus’s success in Iraq, combined with his deft political touch, has made him as close to bulletproof as anyone can be in this town, and he obviously wasn’t counting on that alone; it was astonishing how many members seemed to have just returned from the front.

Most important, the progress in Afghanistan is real — but, then, that was true in Iraq in 2007 and had little impact on the political debate, when there was such bitterness between President George W. Bush and Democrats that Iraqi reality was almost irrelevant. Bush had played the “soft on homeland security” card mercilessly and effectively, and Democrats were looking for payback.

Obama’s escalation, when 73 percent of Americans want substantial numbers of troops brought home, would seem to open fertile ground to Republicans. But from their leaders on down, they haven’t sought to plow there. In this instance at least, politics really has stopped at the water’s edge.

Meanwhile, the president has cocooned his activist policy in minimalist rhetoric. He never speaks of victory or idealistic goals, certainly not for the Afghan people. When he announced the surge in December 2009, he simultaneously emphasized a July 2011 withdrawal. When he nudged that withdrawal clock to the end of 2014, there was no address to the nation marking the new emphasis.

There are costs to this reticence. It’s hard to build support for an unpopular war if you leave that job to Petraeus and Flournoy, as capable as both are. Already, Congress is threatening to reduce funding for the civilian side of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, which could undercut both missions.

On the other hand, by doing as much as he thinks necessary while talking as little as he thinks possible, Obama may make it easier for all kinds of politicians to stay on board — Republicans who vilify him in almost every other context and liberal Democrats who dislike the policy, whose supporters hate the policy and who therefore would rather talk about almost anything else.

It may not be exactly how textbooks say leaders are supposed to lead — and if you believe the war is a mistake, it’s a picture of democracy failing to respond. But if, like Obama, you believe we need “an enduring, long-term commitment to Afghanistan,” as Flournoy paraphrased last week, “having made the mistake historically of walking away and then paid a very dear price for that,” then it is reassuring to see that Washington can stick with something hard, in a bipartisan and civil way.

Given the alternative still fresh in his memory, that’s probably good enough for Petraeus as he flies back to the war this week.

fredhiatt@washpost.com

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With each passing day, the Obama administration is looking more and more like the Clinton administration.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Friday that his new chief of staff will be Bruce Reed, who spent eight years working for President Clinton, first as his assistant for domestic policy planning, then as deputy domestic policy adviser and finally as chief domestic policy adviser.

Mr. Reed, who has led the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, will be succeeding Ron Klain, who is leaving the vice president’s staff to run Case Holdings, the parent company of a former AOL chief Steve Case’s investment company.

Mr. Reed most recently worked for the Obama administration as the executive director of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, often called the Simpson-Bowles commission for its chairmen, Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, who served as Mr. Clinton’s chief of staff. “I’ve known and admired Bruce for over 20 years,” Mr. Biden said.

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KOKOMO, Ind.—President Obama came to this manufacturing town in the Midwest on Tuesday to say that his jobs agenda and economic policies were putting the economy on the right track.

Mr. Obama told workers at a Chrysler plant that he had acted aggressively to save the automobile industry because “we had confidence in the American worker —today, we know that was the right decision.”

“We’re coming back,” Mr. Obama told cheering workers at the plant, which makes  transmissions. “We’re on the move.”

He said that thanks in part to his government policies, American car manufacturers were poised to hire more workers as the automobile industry remakes itself.

The White House said the point of the visit was to check up on how Kokomo, which was hard hit by the recession, was doing two years after Mr. Obama visited the town during the presidential campaign.

The visit looked like another campaign trip. With Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. by his side, Mr. Obama even tapped some of the rhetoric of unity that he used during the  campaign, telling workers that Democrats and Republicans “have got to put outside our differences.”

“The election’s over,” he said. “The most important challenge we face is not between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between America and our competitors. “

He also called on Democrats and Republicans to resolve the issue of the Bush-era tax cuts, although he did not indicate where he planned to come out in the debate over tax cuts for the richest Americans.

The White House chose Indiana, a state that Mr. Obama improbably carried in 2008, for his first big domestic trip since the midterm elections ushered his Democratic Party out of control of the House. The state is traditionally Republican territory, and home to two potential Republican presidential candidates in 2012, Gov. Mitch Daniels and Representative Mike Pence.

Mr. Obama worked the rope line of military families upon arriving at Grissom Air Reserve Base in nearby Peru.

Then he and Mr. Biden made an unannounced stop at the Kokomo Fire Department, where they chatted with firefighters who had been laid off and then rehired thanks to a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

After that, it was on to another unannounced stop at Sycamore Elementary School, where some 300 students, screaming deliriously, lined up to greet Mr. Obama.

“Omigod, he touched me! He touched me!” one little girl yelled.

Mr. Biden, for his part, was quick to emphasize his own manufacturing background, telling workers at the plant that his father had worked in autos. “I was telling the boss over here that the thing I like most, being the son of an automobile man, my dad would be happy, for the first time that J.D. Powers likes” American auto prospects more than foreign competitors these days, Mr. Biden said.

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