I was SHOCKED at Uber Liberal Mike Lupica's column the other day, because he's been an Obama cheerleader for longer than any of the other New York writers.

My point: If Obama is losing the backing of even the most liberal writers, he might be in more trouble than I thought (in terms of his popularity and re-election chances).

President Obama is looking like former President George W. Bush with Afghanistan plan

Mike Lupica, New York Daily News

There was the press pass at the bottom of a drawer Sunday, from Jan. 9, 2008, Saint Peter's College, "Change We Can Believe In" written in great big white and blue letters. It was the first time I ever saw and heard Barack Obama speak in person, heard the highest language and ideals we had gotten from a presidential candidate since Robert F. Kennedy 40 years before him.

"We are at a defining moment in our history," he said that day.

Now, nearly two years later, Obama is President and Tuesday night he isn't in a basketball gym in Jersey City. Instead, he gives a speech to the whole country from the United States Military Academy, using West Point like the backdrop of a movie set.

This speech isn't about the change he talked about as a candidate, or the audacity of hope. It is expected to be about hopelessness, the President perhaps increasing troops in Afghanistan by as much as 50% over the next year-and-a-half. Somehow he is expected to outline his exit strategy at the same time.

Sure he will.

You know when we are going to be out of Afghanistan, where the United States has become just one more losing road team? Sometime around the 12th of Never. The more who die there, the more we send over. This is Obama's surge, just without him calling it that, because that would make him sound too much like the big war President before him.

If he makes this announcement about more troops Tuesday night, it is the beginning of Barack Obama's own approval ratings ending up where George W. Bush's did.

"We're going to finish the job there," he says, and really does sound more like Bush than ever.

Somehow Bush fooled the country into a second term. The way things are going for Obama, there isn't going to be one for him. It is why there is this growing sentiment, even from people who voted for him, that the gate-crashers at the White House aren't a former cheerleader and her husband (did the Secret Service learn defense from the Knicks?), it is the President and all those advising him.

Maybe he can explain himself better on Afghanistan than he has on health care, even as he prepares to send 30,000 more American soldiers, or 35,000, whatever it is, over to the world capital of heroin production to become targets. It doesn't make him right.

Obama's critics on the right aren't doing this to him, neither are career draft dodgers like Dick Cheney. The change candidate becomes just another President telling us that if we lose Afghanistan then there goes Pakistan next, and after that, look out, Minneapolis.

Was there a time when Afghanistan was the central front of the war on terror? There was. But that was before we let Osama Bin Laden walk out of a cave in Tora Bora and into Pakistan. We couldn't take him out and couldn't take out Mullah Mohammed Omar of the Taliban but now more troops are supposed to turn the whole thing around.

"You need to put everyone you can as quickly as you can and deliver a knockout punch to the enemy," Sen. Jon Kyl, a Republican from Arizona, said yesterday.

Kyl of Arizona: another politician who never served a day in the military in his life, wanting to tell you all about it, war and soldiers and victory in the mountains.

It is one thing for this President to trust this country's economic bailout to a bunch of huckster insiders from Wall Street. It is quite another to bail out a bum like President Hamid Karzai, even for the noblest of reasons, in Afghanistan.

Somehow we can take brave American kids and train them in a few months to go fight the Taliban. But after eight years we are waiting for Afghanistan to assemble a real army of its own. Still our generals call for more troops, even though it isn't the generals who will die in the mountains, it will be young Marines.

As someone once said about Vietnam, "The only way out is the door."

Obama should never have given in to all the tinhorn generals in Congress and the media, all the others war experts who never wore a uniform in defense of this country for a single day. At a time when he is clearly afraid of being called weak, that would have been real strength from him. Saying no to all of them. He keeps looking for ways to say no to a second term instead.