President Obama last night gave his first Oval Office address to the nation to lay out his plan for dealing with the crisis in the Gulf.
If you missed the speech, don’t worry: Marshmallows have more substance.
The address included more tough talk on BP (minus the profanities), plans to start an escrow account to help people harmed by the disaster and the faint outlines of an agenda for a green-energy economy.
Many liberals were hoping Obama would use the BP disaster as a “teachable moment” for the country and make the case that the government plays a critical role in society. Obama himself recently complained to Politico’s Roger Simon that conservatives were hypocrites for saying they want less government but then attacking the government for not doing enough about the oil spill.
Fair enough. But the flip side of that coin is the oil spill highlighted a borderline-criminal dysfunction in the federal government — which sort of undermines the Obama argument that the government works for the people.
Obama’s nod to this factor was to announce he is bringing in a former federal prosecutor and inspector general to clean up the Minerals Management Service, a cauldron of mismanagement, ethical breaches and incompetence.
That’s nice. But what took so long?
He also told us he had tapped Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi, “to develop a long-term Gulf Coast Restoration Plan as soon as possible.”
Another plan. Yay.
And then, of course, Obama is establishing a “national commission to understand the causes of this disaster and offer recommendations on what additional safety and environmental standards we need to put in place.”
We don’t need any more plans or commissions. We need a permanent moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling and some sort of functional cleanup system for the damage that’s been done.
There’s a reason there was a 30-year bipartisan congressional and presidential ban on offshore drilling in the lower 48 states. The risks are too great.
The government and the oil industry have more than demonstrated their inability to deal with any adverse events that occur with these deepwater wells, so they should not be permitted to exist.
That’s what Obama should have said — but didn’t.
Instead, he promoted the fiction that the government is on top of this and even suggested that in a mere two weeks 90 percent of the oil would be captured. (Yeah, and I’m the founder of the Tea Party.)
Funny, the people on the ground have a different story. At yesterday’s Senate hearing, Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, said, “I still don’t know who’s in charge. Is it BP? Is it the Coast Guard?” It’s been two months. That’s a problem.
Obama went on to tell Americans, yet again, that we need to kick the oil habit. “For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil-industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.”
Yeah, Mr. President — kinda like that time a few months ago when you came out in support of offshore drilling and claimed it was so safe. That kind of political courage and candor?
But Obama really came up short on what many had hoped would be the showcase of the speech: an entreaty to Americans to truly embrace a clean energy agenda.
While he made the economic and geopolitical case for getting off oil, he failed to inspire Americans with a vision of a country free of the environmental pollution — whether in our water, food or air — caused by oil consumption. At no time has the environmental hazard of oil been so stark, yet he missed the opportunity to really bring it home for Americans.
President Obama still doesn’t get it. kirstenpowers@aol.com