Obama’s Not-Very-Well-Received Gulf Oil Speech

I missed the speech, but have been bouncing around the responses.

Not only does Kevin Drum hate it, but his commenters hate it. That’s not good news for the President.

(note that I don’t object to flaying BP; from the documents out to date, this wasn’t an ‘act of God’ event, but instead an ‘iceberg? what iceberg? we’re drinking here…’ kind of event. They deserve pretty much all the grief they are going to take and then some.)

5 thoughts on “Obama’s Not-Very-Well-Received Gulf Oil Speech”

  1. Honestly, did anyone like that speech?

    I thought it was a mass of platitudes and self-contradictions and outright wrong notions.

    I also thought it was just me being cranky, until I started seeing the underwhelmed commentary from his own base constituents and commentators.

  2. Some of you old cranks remember the “Malaise Speech”. This was the Borderline Personality Disorder Speech.

  3. I’m worried. Obama has been living in a dream world where outrage accomplishes goals and your standing is determined by how well you can rally your troops. Thats fine for a legislator, but for an executive it has less value.

    In the president’s world, you embarrass or threaten somebody, and they go ‘kick some butts’ and (almost magically) something gets changed or fixed. In his life, Obama has never been the guy that actually has to pick up the phone and find out exactly where the hold up is and what needs to be physically done to right it.

    Its not surprising. From his worldview, corporations and companies are run by lucky people living off (exploiting really) the rest of us. One is just as good as another. GM going bankrupt? Slush them some govment money and plug in a buddy to run the place. How hard can it be?

    Pretty hard, in reality. Yes, there are incompetents in business, but _barring outside interference,_ they tend to crash and burn and there is a price to be paid for bad decisions. Not so, in Obama’s world. His failures, and his governments failures, and his government’s corporate lackey failures simply mean he doesn’t have enough money, power, and control to make it work. That recipe never changes or ends.

    Its a competence issue, and at the end of the day, practically nobody in this administration has in their lives been judged by the competence test. Academics and activists work hard to make sure that is the case. But now the rubber meets the road and there is nobody left who actually knows how to do things.

    Maybe the people that do are vacationing in Galt’s Gulch?

  4. And am I paranoid to think that if somebody from the outside were to show up now with a magic bullet, it would make the President (and BP) look worse… as in ‘why didn’t we think of this or talk to this guy before’?

    I suspect the folks involved in this thing aren’t fielding a lot of calls from outsiders, even experts in Europe etc. As far as showing the initiative to _make_ such a call… yeah, right.

  5. I have to admit the malaise speech came to mind, but in all fairness the malaise speech had more substance.

    Do you think he had a stomach virus? Iron deficiency anemia? He seemed completely detached.

    It wasn’t even political, it was less than nothing. Very, Very strange!!!

    Mike Tyson on 60 minutes is the closest thing I can get to describe it.

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