President Obama has referred to ISIS as both the “junior varsity” and a “cancer” that we will “degrade and destroy.” He also says of ISIS that it is a “manageable problem.” Yet in yesterday’s joint op-ed piece with British Prime Minister David Cameron, he writes that our country “will not be cowed by barbaric killers.” Well, which is it? Peggy Noonan asks in the WSJ, “Is the administration’s foreign-policy apparatus as rudderless, ad hoc and faux-sophisticated as it looks?”

At the Seafair mansion in Newport last Friday, kickoff to the busy Labor Day weekend and making a gridlock of Newport traffic, President Obama attended a Democratic fundraiser. There, as the WSJ’s Daniel Henninger reports, Obama told the 60 or so guests who had paid as much as $32,000 to hear him speak, who the greatest threats to America today are. If you’re thinking that the president called out those responsible for the beheadings of American journalists or the rolling tanks into Iraq and eastern Ukraine, or Boko Haram, you’re wrong. No, Mr. Obama said, “So the answer to our challenges is actually pretty simple—we need a better Congress.”

As Ms. Noonan points out, “Is the president starting to fear, deep down, that maybe he is the junior varsity?” Read more here from Peggy Noonan on what appears to be a rudderless administration.