Nobody liked it. Well, of course nobody liked it: Until the oil well stops belching crude into the Gulf of Mexico, there’s nothing that the president of the United States can say about the crisis that will make anyone feel better about it. So maybe the speech shouldn’t have been given at all — except that it had to be given, because for weeks and weeks the White House has been pilloried by the cult of the presidency’s true believers (and the occasional opportunist) for not doing enough about the spill, not talking tough enough or acting engaged enough or something, anything, whatever, just do something, Mr. President! And so the White House did what White Houses do, and especially White Houses with a lot of confidence in their occupant’s oratorical powers: They scheduled a prime-time address, and hoped for the best.
Given this impossible context, I thought the speech was reasonably well-crafted. For the majority of Americans who just want the oil leak plugged, there was a lot of statistical detail and martial rhetoric (now we have a War on the Oil Spill to go with all our other oh-so-successful campaigns), all of it designed to create the impression of presidential action while disguising the reality of presidential impotence. For the president’s liberal base, who have convinced themselves that Obama can somehow use this crisis as a bridge to our supposed green-energy future, there was a shout-out to the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House and a lot of talk about “the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels,” all of it designed to conceal the fact that the White House is unwilling to spend its political capital in a doomed push for carbon-pricing legislation. And for Republicans like Dick Lugar, Lindsey Graham and Co., who are currently shopping an alternative energy bill, there was the promise to “look at other ideas and approaches from either party,” which was probably an empty rhetorical flourish but at least sounded bipartisan and open-minded.
But of course everybody saw through these rhetorical maneuvers, and nobody was satisfied. The speech was attacked from the right because it talked too much about green energy (see Clive Crook, for instance, and Jonah Goldberg and Byron York) instead of explaining how we’re going to plug the leak, and it was attacked from the left because it didn’t talk nearly enough about green energy and kicking our addiction to oil (see James Fallows and Ezra Klein and the talking heads on MSNBC, among many others). It was attacked for thinking too big and for thinking too small. It was attacked for being too hard on BP and too soft on BP. And to add insult to injury, it even inspired Slate’s Daniel Gross to compare Obama unfavorably (well, sort of) to George W. Bush.
All of this piling-on is fair enough so far as it goes: Certainly last night’s speech will not echo down through the ages alongside Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, and it was more than a little irritating to sit through an Oval Office address with so little meat on its bones. But while the pundit class is free to use the occasion of a toxic oil spill to defend the environmental benefits of fossil fuels, or to explain that what a nation coping with 9 percent unemployment really needs to hear is a re-run of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, the president of the United States faces far more significant constraints. And given those constraints, and the cultish spirit in which too many Americans approach the office of the presidency, I thought Obama probably did the best he could last night — even if that “best” mainly inspired a sense of the limits of the president’s powers, and sympathy for the thankless aspects of the job.