Disappointing -- Dull -- Pedantic -- Unspecific -- Patently false -- Egotistical -- Listless -- Misleading -- Smug -- Wandering -- Politics over practicality -- Petulant -- Self-serving -- Boring -- Manipulative -- Off target.These are a few of the words describing Barack Obama's prime-time address to the nation last night -- that much ballyhooed (though long time coming) speech on the BP oil spill crisis. With his administration under fire for being disengaged from the disaster, with his public approval dropping to yet new lows, and with the increasing revelations of just how catastrophic this thing is getting, the President desperately needed to be honest, forthright, inspirational and full of practical steps about stopping the escaping oil and cleaning up the Gulf.
He failed miserably on all counts.
Here are just a few notable reactions, beginning with the loony leftists Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman and Keith Olberman.
* At the Washington Post, Michael Gerson writes, "The main impression left by President Obama’s address on the oil spill is the chasm between the ambition of its commitments and the thinness of its policies...
The setting of the Oval Office creates an expectation of decisive executive action. It recalls memories of President Dwight Eisenhower dispatching federal troops to Little Rock or President John F. Kennedy announcing the naval "quarantine" of Cuba. This speech will not be confused with those precedents. Obama urges others to take action, kibitzes with corporate executives, shifts some government personnel and signals the start of a review process. A crisis is met with a study. The action verbs in this speech have somehow gone missing. It is all rather limp and weak.
For this I would not blame the speechwriters, who must ultimately work with the policy they are given. But someone at the White House is responsible for putting Obama in a dramatic setting with little worth saying. Whoever they are, they have not done the president, or the country, much service."
* Newsweek, who once appeared as if it were on the Obama payroll, titled its report, "Obama's Curiously Flat Gulf Speech."
* Over at Big Hollywood, Jeff Dunetz writes, "Putting aside for a second the fact that this speech was given about 50 days late, last night’s oval office speech proved that the President is not ready to be honest with the American people. For the first 30 days of this crisis, President Obama was ignoring the fact that the crisis existed, and now when he uses the oval office to give the people confidence that he is on top of the problem he spends more time trying to sell cap and trade than discussing capping the well. Essentially, he is still ignoring the crisis..."
* "The President's Oil Reserves Lie." In this American Thinker article, Chad Stafko points out a few of the wild untruths Obama used Tuesday night in trying to use the crisis to sell his energy bill.
* At the New York Post, Michael Goodwin says, "Once again, President Obama channels Oscar Wilde, who famously said the only thing he couldn't resist was temptation. So it is with Obama's attempt to turn the Gulf oil debacle into a reason why America should embrace his cap-and-tax energy policy. No matter the crisis, Obama can't resist the temptation to exploit it in his quest to grow the government.
* A. J. Strata at the Strata-Sphere: "The president’s speech was a pathetic dud. The take away line – contrary to the pundits – was his admission that “we don’t know how to get there”. Brit Hume said it well last night, cleaning up the Gulf is too small for this egomaniac. This president wants to wean the world off oil!!!
Talk about your Walter Mitty moment. The idea we should tax energy AND cut off 30% of our oil supply with a 6 month embargo of off shore drilling (which will grow into a many year drought as oil rigs move to other nations) is stupendously reckless. Want a double dip recession? We just got one...."
* Hardy liberal Roger Simon of Politico wasn't satisfied either, " Maybe the location was wrong. Maybe using the Oval Office - and it was the first time the president has used it for a speech - upped the ante too much. Maybe we expected too much. Like details."
* Terence P. Jeffrey, Editor-in-Chief of CNS News titles his report with a question, "Obama’s Speech Raises Question: Where Does He Get the Authority to ‘Inform’ a Private Company That It Must Surrender Its Money?"
* Iain Murray dropped this in over at NRO's The Corner -- "That, in a nutshell, was the point of the speech. For all the talk about an independent third party adjudicating compensation claims (we have one of those, it's called the Court) and regulating companies (by making them even more dependent on government for favors), the oil spill is simply an excuse to kick-start a stalled policy. He admitted that no one knows how to replace oil, but his chosen policy vehicle is more expensive energy. That's really going to help the victims of the second man-made disaster, the people put out of work by his drilling ban. This is the day that President Obama opened his second front in his war on the middle class. He'd already succeeded in his plan to raise their health-care costs. Now he's going to raise their energy costs, which will be far more dangerous, because energy costs affect everything else — food costs, household goods costs and, yes, health care costs too. This amounts to a sacrifice to angry gods, as Bob Nelson pointed out last week. It's the people who are going to get really angry, though.
But here's the real kicker. Tomorrow he's going to meet with the people who stand to benefit most from raised energy prices — BP, whose policy goal this idea has been for years. You couldn't make it up."
* Calvin Woodward comments for the AP, "Obama aimed high in his prime-time Oval Office address Tuesday night — perhaps higher than the facts support and history teaches — as he vowed to restore livelihoods and nature from the still-unfolding calamity in the Gulf of Mexico." And then he goes on to do a fact check of Obama's statements and finds them, at best, ethereal.
* And finally, here from the Los Angeles Times is Andrew Malcolm, "...But watching the president and hearing him was a little creepy; that early portion of the address was robotic, lacked real energy, enthusiasm. And worst of all specifics. He was virtually detail-less. After almost two months of waiting through continuously contradictory reports, an anxious American public wanted to know, HOW are you going to accomplish all this?...
Trust me, the president said, tomorrow I'm going to give those BP execs what-for. As CBS' Mark Knoller noted on his Twitter account, the president has allotted exactly 20 whole minutes this morning -- 1,200 fleeting seconds -- to his first-ever conversation with the corporation responsible for the disaster...
Instead, Obama was like a Harvard-trained nurse talking vacation to a new patient bleeding all over the ER floor. Hello, could we please stop the blood flow here before we discuss the long-term recovery?
Obama’s delivery did not really come alive until the end when the ex-community organizer got into his favorite Big Picture stuff. Memo to American Homeowners: Do not call Obama over to fix your leaking roof – or pipe. Have him design a new house, no, better yet an entire neighborhood or city from scratch.
Following the advice of his chief of staff, Rahm "I Got a Rent-Free Apartment from a BP Adviser" Emanuel, Obama is determined to leave no crisis unused. When he got into the decades-long fossil fuel addiction rehab stuff, his eyes shone. His delivery punched up.
Now, that is an issue that requires greatness. Another galactic reform out of Hyde Park. It sounds swell unless mega-trillion-dollar federal deficits are on your mind, which voter polls now show ranks with terrorism as Americans' top fears..."
