BIG BLACK: Invisible Hand Of The Free Market Man

TIME: It is also an issue that requires bravery — bravery of the sort Obama demonstrated when he pressed on with health care, even after Scott Brown’s victory. As he put it last night, “Time and again, the path forward [to energy innovation] has been blocked — not only by oil-industry lobbyists but also by a lack of political courage and candor.” Still, Obama himself didn’t show much of either. He never mentioned the phrases climate change or global warming. While he praised the House of Representatives for passing an “energy and climate bill” last year, he made no mention of a Senate proposal currently dying on the vine because it lacks the 60 votes needed to clear that chamber. Even worse, he made a vague case for energy reform that included piecemeal ideas like raising efficiency standards in buildings, and played the nativist card of warning about the growing clean-energy investments of China and India. And he offered no explanation of the cap-and-trade or carbon-tax ideas that so many Democrats consider essential to limiting greenhouse gases. That’s nothing like how Obama would explain the problem in a private setting with trusted allies. But at a time when Obama’s own approval ratings for his handling of the spill are dipping, the White House is reportedly worried that that such talk polls poorly, especially among key swing voters. MORE

FROOMKIN: 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. MORE