Opinion: Obama Leaves No Crisis Unused

(June 15) -- For being a real good talker, President Barack Obama took his own sweet time giving his first Oval Office address to the country.

As the first modern president to pass his first full year in office without addressing the country from his historic desk, Obama chose to underline the import of this speech by sitting there with the requisite flags and family photos in the background. He delivered it crisply and forthrightly, though too often distracting viewers with his fidgeting hands like the lecturing professor he once was.

He had the proper firmness down right: Make no mistake, etc. We will hold BP accountable, etc. He had the God references. The talk of real live shrimpers devastated. An American way of life threatened. And though he likened the spill more to an epidemic, he also brought in the requisite battle metaphors.

Two, no, three other things stuck out. The first two-thirds of his remarks read fine about, by golly, we'll get the money, we'll clean it up, no matter how long it takes.

But A) they lacked specifics. How are you going to accomplish this? Fixing it has been a kind of given since Day Four, which was still five days before the Democrat got down there. Gulf Coast officials are already tearing out their hair trying to comprehend and comply with 17 federal agencies, which are falling all over themselves to do the boss' bidding and help and impose and superimpose their visions and regulations on what is a war zone with hundreds of ships and some 30,000 people involved, many of them frightened.

And B) if you watched the president, that early portion of the address lacked real energy, enthusiasm. Obama's delivery did not really come alive until the end when the ex-community organizer got into his favorite big-picture stuff. Don't call Obama to fix a leaking roof -- or pipe. Have him design a new house -- no, better yet an entire neighborhood from scratch.

Leave no crisis unused. So when the president got into the decades-long fossil fuel addiction rehab stuff, his eyes shone. And his delivery punched up. It's scary stuff if a ga-trillion-dollar deficit is on anyone's mind.

Obama's presidential campaign was not only big in terms of an unprecedented three-quarters of a billion dollars. It was about Big Promises. He was going to change American, radically reform the entire educational system and the health care system, go through the entire federal budget line by line, oh, and change the way the nation's partisan capital works. The only big change he left out was getting the Cubs a World Series ring.

It was all impractical, of course. But the country wanted to believe in his change you can believe in. And it did, handing complete control of the federal government over to Obama and his Democratic Party. And now, after a full year of lopsided Democratic majorities fighting over health care instead of jobs, jobs, jobs, almost 60 percent of Americans would like the new health bill repealed.

President Obama says he doesn't sense an appetite to address something as large as the illegal immigrant issue this year.

But suddenly -- watch the left hand over here because he wants you to not focus on how long it's taken him to take charge of the spill -- he thinks there's a compelling need to spend a gazillion more dollars the federal government doesn't have to change the country's energy habits -- starting now because of an underwater leaking pipe 40 miles off Louisiana.

And if, by chance, the nation's politicians are fighting over an energy plan the next few months until the Nov. 2 midterm elections, maybe the politically damaging health care regrets will drown in all the words like so many thousands of seabirds in all the gulf's escaping oil.

Andrew Malcolm is the Top of the Ticket blogger for the Los Angeles Times.


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