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Insert memorable quote here. Seriously, I just finished watching President Obama give his first televised speech from the Oval Office, and with all the hype comparing the speech to JFK’s “ask not what you can do for your country” speech and FDR’s famous inaugural address (“We have nothing to fear but fear itself”), I was left feeling a bit underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, President Obama is a great speaker, and while the jury’s still out on a public opinion reaction to it, I have a feeling it will have an effect on public perception of the recovery effort.
Though it was a great speech, and doing it in the Oval Office certainly added the sense of urgency, but to me this speech felt more like a normal Presidential speech, as in nothing truly special. The Oval Office address is supposed to be the game-changer, the speech that incites the nation to action. For instance, George W. Bush spoke from the Oval Office right after 9/11; though other Presidents have each addressed different issues from the Oval Office, this is the best example of the kind of speech the occasion is meant for. Coming out of the speech with no memorable quotes to throw up here makes me wonder if this speech would have been better if it had been made from the Gulf coast. Then again, successful speeches are not determined solely by their memorable quotes, but also by their policy implications.
Holding BP’s Feet to the Fire
If anything, this speech will be remembered as the time that President Obama came out swinging against BP. According to the New York Times article, the President is going to stop at nothing until the Gulf is restored to something resembling the way it was before the spill- and BP’s going to pay for it all, from the claims to the actual cleanup and economic redevelopment costs. Maybe it’s just being down here in Houston, a center of BP’s North American operations, but it seems there’s been a lot of attention paid to the claims process and how it hasn’t worked that well. To that end, President Obama demanded the BP set aside enough money to handle the claims and put it into a separate account, to be run by an independent party. Very good move. Nothing like a little independent oversight to assuage a weary public. Then again, the Federal Government’s response hasn’t been very impressive either, so we’ll have to see.
President Obama spent a large portion of the speech defending that response, and it was sorely needed. Regardless of how the response actually was, it just wasn’t fast enough and comprehensive enough to silence the critics. After Democrats campaigned using their standard assertion that the solution to America’s problems is more government, some people buy into that assertion a little too much. News flash guys: as much as it would be awesome if the Federal Government could stop the largest environmental disaster in our history just like that, it can’t.
Government, citizens, and industry are doing the best they can, but it’s hard to stop Mother Nature from doing what it will. The oil was going to come up, but it’s almost certain that a lot more would be washing onshore without the effort. Another issue people have is the pace of approval and supply to plans drawn up by state and local authorities. President Obama did not directly address this part of it, but he did announce the creation of a “Gulf Recovery Czar” position of sorts, asking Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to devise an integrated plan that uses everyone in the region to restore it in the short- and long-term. Of course, President Obama also took the time to try and push for a more, shall we say, permanent solution.
Promoting Policy, Without Promoting Policy
Of course, that permanent solution I mention is not the relief wells being drilled in the Gulf. The President devoted a fair amount of time to promoting his green energy priorities, and tried to inspire Americans to shift away from fossil fuels. Among his priorities, he touted retooling factories to make wind turbines and a proliferation of solar panel suppliers, obviously to come as part of The Great American Recovery. Policy-wise, he spoke of the need for potentially altering building codes to promote sustainable practices and invest in greater research and design of the next generation of energy supply and consumption.
Wait what? Promoting clean energy as a business could be an effective way to spur adoption of solar and wind power with substantial assistance from the public sector to be sure, but building codes?!?! Isn’t that something done at the city level, much less the state? Sure, he could affect the network of buildings owned or used by the Federal Government and that would be a start, but come on! I’m sure he does have an acceptable proposal for that in the works, but that gets at the heart of what I found lacking from the speech.
I support Cap-and-Trade, depending on how strictly it’s implemented (hint: tougher is better), and I support the response to the spill so far, particularly since President Obama decided to stand up to Big Oil in recent days, even declaring all-out war on their lobbyists in his speech, but I wanted more. Cleaning house at the Minerals Management Service and forcing BP to pony up many billions of dollars to pay for the cleanup and recovery are great first steps, but this speech left me unsatisfied.
I needed a call to action, a modern-day “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” kind of speech like that famous one that I just quoted from President John F. Kennedy all those decades ago. Going into the speech, I thought that’s what I was going to get; after all, President Obama is known for his rhetorical flourishes, for crying out loud! He had a prime opportunity, nay the perfect opportunity, to exhort Americans to take whatever steps they could toward being sustainable, toward cutting our dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels in general; instead we got a well-reasoned form speech detailing what had already been done, and thin on details of what is to come.
Toward the end, when he made allusions to the World War II effort and the moon landing, I thought “this is it; he’s about to introduce a bold new initiative that will change attitudes toward energy policy”. But, alas, he just went on to remind us that we’ve faced crises before and triumphed, and we will keep doing so until the end of time. Yes, the power of delivering a prime time speech from the Oval Office was wasted on a well-reasoned, hopeful, but ultimately weak speech. The speech was good, but it did not fit the location; speaking from the Oval Office is meant to be bold, to be the speech that goes down in history, the speech that makes us firmly believe in the power of the Presidency and emerge instilled with our hearts swelling with American pride.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe the speech that was given is exactly what this country needs, but this screams “wasted opportunity”. Here’s a link to the text and video of the speech, if you want to go through and relive those surprisingly empty 17 minutes of your life.
The Did President Obama Waste His Oval Office Address? by The New Age of Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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