huffingtonpost.com
The most depressing thing about President Obama's profoundly underwhelming speech Tuesday night was that the White House thought it would change everything, when there was no good reason to think it would change anything.
White House aides had excitedly announced that the speech -- his first from the Oval Office -- would be an "inflection point," somehow turning eight weeks of growing anxiety about the disaster in the Gulf and the government's response in a positive new direction.
But vague generalities and empty, convictionless rhetoric just don't have that effect -- certainly not in the midst of a real, concrete national emergency.
How unmoored from reality are Obama and his top advisers to think that some pretty words with so little substance could accomplish so much? It makes me wonder: Was that ultimately the lesson they took from the 2008 campaign -- rather than that a nation was hungering for, you know, actual change?
And how much power do they invest in the trappings of the presidency, such that they thought the Oval Office setting would make his feeble call to action so commanding that it would suddenly, benevolently redirect the public's visceral outrage over the oil spewing from the sea floor, the perfidy of BP, and the sluggishness of the government response?
I don't blame the speechwriter. I blame Obama, or Rahm Emanuel, or David Axelrod, or whoever it was who ultimately decided that words, rather than action, were the best way to change the perception that the government isn't doing enough in the Gulf.
Eight weeks into an ongoing environmental disaster the likes of which this country has never seen, it was incumbent upon Obama to directly and specifically address some tough issues. |
