Obama Speech: Reviews

Obama's first address to the nation from the Oval Office didn't go over too well, even with some of his political allies in the media.

I was on the road when Obama delivered the speech so I heard it on the radio. That gave me the opportunity to focus on the substance without being distracted by his appearance, body language, and the family photos that I was certain would be in the background.

I found his remarks to be far too vague. His "war on oil" imagery was rather disturbing. I have no confidence in his ability to manage this catastrophe. I wanted to hear him talk about real solutions to the problems at hand, not yap about lofty goals for the future. His prayer lines at the end rang very hollow.

Later, when I watched the speech, I was struck by his constant hand movements. They were driving me nuts. They were dizzying, very unnatural. To me, it looked like a bad audition tape.

Here's a sampling of reviews--

From the New York Times, editorial:

Americans have been anxiously waiting for President Obama to take full charge of the gulf oil catastrophe. On Tuesday, in his first address from the Oval Office, he vowed to “fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes” and declared that “we will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused.”

Mr. Obama and his team will have to follow through — with more energy and dedication than they have shown so far.

We know that the country is eager for reassurance. We’re not sure the American people got it from a speech that was short on specifics and devoid of self-criticism. Certainly, we hope that Mr. Obama was right when he predicted that in “coming weeks and days,” up to 90 percent of the oil leaking from the well will be captured and the well finally capped by this summer. But he was less than frank about his administration’s faltering efforts to manage this vast environmental and human disaster.

Fifty-six days into the spill and it is not clear who is responsible — BP, federal, state or local authorities — for the most basic decisions, like when to deploy booms to protect sensitive wetlands. It’s not even clear how much oil is pouring out of the ruptured well. On Tuesday, a government panel raised the estimate to as much as 60,000 barrels a day.

Responding to legitimate fears that BP might run out of money or find ways to dodge its obligations, Mr. Obama said that he would order it to “set aside whatever resources are required” to compensate individuals and businesses. Mr. Obama also said the fund would be run by an independent third party to ensure that all legitimate claims were paid out in a fair and timely manner.

He did not, however, say how much money BP must set aside. And it is not clear if the president is also demanding that BP reserve many billions more for the huge cleanup and restoration.

From the Washington Post, Michael Gerson:

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. Obama pledges to "fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes." Then he authorizes National Guard deployments that he cannot order, urging "governors in the affected states to activate these troops as soon as possible." He will "meet with" the chairman of BP to urge him to set aside sufficient recovery funds. He has "asked" someone who works for him to develop a long-term Gulf Coast restoration plan. He will bring "new leadership" to the Minerals Management Service. He will push for energy legislation he supported even before the current disaster, while pronouncing announcing himself "happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party."

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.

From the Wall Street Journal, editorial:

Enduring criticism from partisans of every stripe for his response to the accidental gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama managed last night to convey that he's deeply upset about the disaster and angry at BP. And this being a crisis, he naturally took the opportunity to put his moribund climate legislation back in play.

He promised to throw a new and improved bureaucracy at the disaster. And at BP, he threw what is an unprecedented and possibly illegal exercise in presidential authority.

As expected, Mr. Obama announced his intention to pressure BP into establishing an escrow fund to cover future payouts related to the Gulf spill. While Congressional Democrats have already suggested that BP bring the fund to life with a $20 billion deposit, Mr. Obama daintily avoided the issue of how many tens of billions the British company should pony up.

Tellingly, Mr. Obama declined to cite any legal authority for the escrow fund, about which he plans to "inform" BP CEO Tony Hayward tomorrow. We don't believe the President has the power to force a corporation to set aside money for future, undetermined and open-ended obligations. It is a precedent fraught with potential for abuse.

Most of the Oval Office oil talk was given over to resurrecting Mr. Obama's green agenda and, as before, the arguments were slippery. He blamed deep-water drilling on the scarcity of oil when he has blocked drilling in Alaska and in shallow water along both coasts. His moratorium on drilling makes us more dependent on the very foreign imports he deplored last night.

From Howard Fineman, Newsweek, "Obama's Curiously Flat Gulf Speech":

Somewhere between Pensacola and the Oval Office, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico went from an “assault” to an “epidemic”—and President Obama went from commander-in-chief to surgeon general. In Florida, he had referred to the disaster as an "assault" and spoke, at an Army post, in military terms, but by the time he got home he had changed the analogy to a medical matter.

And that, in short, is why his speech to the nation fell so flat even as he delivered it.

It was Obama who compared the Gulf disaster to World War Two, and it was, unfortunately, Obama who was unable to approach let alone match the specificity, combativeness and passion of Franklin Roosevelt.

Having just made a tour of the battlefield earlier today—a two-day trip to the four hard-hit gulf states—and having scheduled a meeting tomorrow with his putative but not-to-be-trusted allies, the top officials of BP, the president should have delivered a report full of specifics and fighting spirit.

Instead, there was far too much of: a dissertation on the inscrutability of the future; a discussion of the commissions and studies he planned to set up; the fine credentials of his advisors; and a partial admission that he had been way too credulous in accepting “assurances” earlier this year that it was safe to ramp up off-shore drilling off the American coasts.

As for BP, Obama was acting as if he would scare them off and back to their eagle’s nest in Westminster if he spoke too harshly. The fact is that the company has either been mendacious or negligent or both, and why the president did not take the opportunity to say that to them and the world I don’t know.

It made it seem as though he was going to have to beg them to establish an escrow fund on Wednesday, not that he was president and he was going to demand it. Isn’t Obama the guy who was studying up so he could kick some ass? Ok, if it’s not BP, who is it, other than some hapless congressional bureaucrat who he appointed only a few months ago to head the Minerals Management Service?

And where was the battlefield report? FDR and Churchill pored over the maps, knew the troop strengths, knew where the ships were at sea. What evidence is there that this president, famous for his grasp of detail, had that kind of interest in, or stomach for, this war?

Shockingly, even the hacks at MSNBC, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, were critical of Obama's speech.

Video.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I don't sense executive command. And I thought that was the purpose of this speech tonight - command and control. 'I'm calling the shots. My name's Barack Obama. I'm the boss. I'm telling people what to do.' I didn't get that clarity.

If Obama has lost MSNBC, he's really in trouble.