As President Barack Obama launches his re-election bid, there’s an odd mismatch between Obama on domestic policy and Obama on foreign policy. The president’s domestic agenda is both more modest and more sweeping than his foreign policy agenda, which seems at once grandiose and strangely lacking in strategic coherence.

On domestic policy (which was the focus of 85 percent of his State of the Union speech and much of his subsequent swing through key battleground states), Obama’s overarching goal is made crystal clear: “The basic American promise [is] that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement. The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive.”

That’s a goal that’s both comprehensible and oddly modest: Obama makes no grand claims about rising tides of prosperity, about America being or becoming the richest, the smartest, and the best. Instead, he seems willing to settle for the most humble of goals: let us be a nation of people who work hard, do “well enough,” send our kids to college, and retire into something other than poverty.

But if the goal is modest, the blueprint for getting there is sweeping: it’s a coherent vision of interconnected tax, energy, education, and immigration reforms. Obama offers us the basic outlines of a solid strategy for getting from where we are now to where he’d like us to go. Modest goals, but a compelling account of the road we need to take.

On foreign policy, it’s the polar opposite. Obama’s claims about what America is and can be are grandiose rather than modest. His State of the Union speech was full of flourishes: Our military personnel constitute “a generation of heroes”; “the renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe”; and “anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” (I know quite a few U.S. diplomats who would beg to differ, but what do they know?) America “remains the one indispensible nation in world affairs,” and Obama “intend[s] to keep it that way.”

This is fine stuff, but it doesn’t cohere into any clear vision of the U.S. role in the world, or any vision of the world we should try to create. We want to be indispensible–but in what way, how, and for what ends? And though Obama offers a solid list of tactical achievements in which any president could take pride (Bin Laden’s death, withdrawal from Iraq, success in Libya, and more), he offers no clear blueprint for the future. Mostly, we get happy bromides: if only we could all be more like the men and women in our military, who put the mission first, just think of the (unspecified but great) things we could accomplish!

“There is no challenge too great; no mission too hard.” Stirring words, but with none of the specificity we get on domestic policy. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, last Friday, for instance, Obama reiterated to college kids his goal of capping student loan payments to 10 percent of their future monthly income, and announced a “Race to the Top” whereby the federal government would provide additional support to states that work to lessen their students’ debt burden. It’s prosaic–one might even say it’s Clintonian–and it has enough solid detail that it just may work.

But Obama remains far more expansive when looking overseas, as he said during the State of the Union: “We will stand against violence and intimidation. We will stand for the rights and dignity of all human beings.” Well, good. But how, exactly? And what does it mean today for the protesters putting their lives on the line in Damascus?

Another oddity is Obama’s apparent lack of interest in connecting his domestic agenda and our foreign policy agenda. In his recent speeches and re-election narrative (as in the structure of his administration), the two are largely on separate tracks. In the State of the Union speech, aside from a nod to bringing jobs back from overseas, enhancing free trade, and a passing mention of foreign oil, the president spent little time linking the need to fix our educational system with the need to maintain our leadership role in the world, or noting how the rise of the G-20 is affecting our ability to direct changes in the global financial system.

Today, the lines between “domestic” issues and “foreign policy” issues are more blurry than ever before, but you wouldn’t know it from the president’s recent speeches, in which he seems content to view them as two largely separate spheres. It’s a shame: on the campaign trail in ’08, candidate Obama was far more thoughtful and nuanced on these issues than President Obama seems inclined to be.

In a way, of course, it’s hardly fair to expect more from a State of the Union Address or the president’s subsequent campaign forays. Such speeches are famously long, famously empty, and famously boring. Viewed from those expectations, Obama’s ongoing narrative remains solid, if not spectacular: he hits all the required grace notes, and draws implicit but sharp contrasts between his own platform and those of the Republican Party

Still, it would be nice to see the president aim higher, and transcend the partisan exigencies of election years. In his State of the Union speech, Obama offered up members of the military as role models for the rest of us: “They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. … Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.” Yes, indeed.

Rosa Brooks is a professor of law at Georgetown University and a Senior Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. She recently served as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and as Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy in the Pentagon.

*Photo courtesy of Christopher Dilts for Obama for America.