As President Barack Obama marks the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq with a major address to the nation Tuesday evening, what should be a triumphant, “Yes, I did” moment for him will be overshadowed by continued violence in Baghdad, the bad economy, the war in Afghanistan and the president’s fading popularity.

For the third time in four days, Obama will hammer home a crucial message — promise kept — in an Oval Office speech to a war-weary nation, just hours after addressing troops at Fort Bliss, an Army post near El Paso, Texas. It’s an important moment, highlighting Obama’s role as commander in chief and allowing him to claim credit for ending the deeply unpopular, 7-year-old conflict he inherited from President George W. Bush.

But for the president and White House officials, particularly those who were with Obama during the 2008 campaign, the moment has to be one of frustration. A war that largely defined much of that tumultuous campaign has faded from view for many Americans, according to numerous recent polls, meaning a controversial election year promise that Obama has kept may get scant notice because of more immediate problems.

The still-unsettled Iraqi state also complicates matters for Obama; while avoiding Bush’s famous “mission accomplished” declaration, the president must nevertheless signal a satisfactory conclusion to the second-longest war in American history. The White House has said Obama, speaking on prime time TV for only the second time, will hit the same themes as in his weekly address last Saturday, thanking the troops and reiterating that “as a candidate for this office, I pledged I would end this war; as president, that’s what I’m doing.”

It’s a smart strategy, said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the former assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan.

“I think where he has to be careful is that you don’t want to claim too much,” Korb said. “You don’t want to put too rosy a picture on it. ... You don’t want to be held responsible.”

Yet even as Obama trumpets the U.S. military withdrawal, 50,000 advisory troops will stay behind to advise the government and face combat-level danger for the foreseeable future. At the same time, Iraq is still without a functioning government, and last week militants killed dozens of Iraqis with a string of deadly, coordinated attacks, forcing the White House to insist that the Iraqi security forces are ready to stand on their own.

“The president is confident that the effort to transition from a combat role in Iraq to Iraqi forces being in charge of their own security has been a successful one, and they are capable of taking on their own security,” Bill Burton, White House deputy press secretary, told reporters last week.

Obama will also talk about developments in Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history, which has grown more unpopular since he took office in 2008. Obama, who has consistently opposed the Iraq invasion as a “dumb war” since he ran in 2008, will talk about how he has taken the fight to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and how his strategy to add 30,000 troops this year is working.

But closing the chapter on Iraq with an endorsement of Afghanistan is a politically risky endeavor — especially since U.S. casualties have gone up, the Afghan government is weak and polls show more people think the war is a mistake.

“Afghanistan is a real mess,” said Ohio State University professor John Mueller. “Doing a cheerleading call for Afghanistan at this point … I don’t think would be a very good idea.”

A Newsweek poll earlier this month showed 58 percent of those surveyed oppose the Afghanistan war, 47 percent disapprove of the way Obama has handled it and just 27 percent think the U.S. should stick to its current plan. The dilemma Obama faces in the speech is that Iraq is dwarfed as a public concern by Afghanistan, a war a majority of Americans believe the U.S. is losing, and the staggering economy. It may be difficult for Obama to get credit from voters for keeping his word on Iraq when the conflict has mostly faded from the headlines.

“Ultimately, trying to change the subject from where the American people are to something else isn’t going to work,” said David Winston, president of right-leaning polling firm The Winston Group. The economy "is what people are focused on, and they either address it or they don’t.”

But others say that because the economy is largely out of his direct control, Obama must seize the credit for any positive developments, especially since his approval rating is well below 50 percent and falling.

“They need good news to point to at a time when much of the [White House] news coverage is bad,” said Bruce Buchanan, a presidential scholar at the University of Texas. “They need to remind people that they have achievements, especially the Democratic base.”

Perhaps the most serious complication for Obama, observers say, is the worsening state of the economy, which continues to be the top priority for voters and continues to drag down Obama’s favorability ratings, now around 45 percent. And as bad economic news persists, it reinforces widespread concerns that the president’s policies aren’t making things better.

The latest troubling sign came last Friday, when the government reported that GDP growth slowed to a crawl in the second quarter, prompting Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to promise greater intervention to keep the economy afloat. Further bad news could be on the way Friday, when the August employment report is due.

Given the distractions and grim headlines, Mueller generally downplayed the effect this speech might have in moving public opinion on Obama one way or another. Oval Office speeches on wars, he said, tend to have very little impact on long-term American public opinion historically, and waning interest in both Iraq and Afghanistan follows that trend.

“It’s the bully pulpit — the effects of it have usually been exaggerated anyway,” Mueller said. Aside from those by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general, speeches like Obama’s “almost never have much impact. People forget about them.”

Aug. 30, 2010