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Gail Collings / NYT :
The boring speech policy

On Monday night in Ohio, a 62-foot-tall statue of Jesus got hit by lightning and burned to the ground. (The adult bookstore across the street was unscathed.) Less than 12 hours later, Gen. David Petraeus — who is not God, although certain members of Congress have been known to worship at his altar — semifainted at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Then Bravo announced that the White House gate-crashers were getting a TV show. Al and Tipper remained in Splitsville. And the oil kept on spilling.

So you sort of knew from the portents that President Obama's big Oval Office speech was not going to be a terrific game-changer. The way things had been going, the president was lucky that a man-eating pterodactyl didn't come crashing through the window during his opening remarks.

Still, it was a disappointment. I was hoping for a call to arms, a national mission as great as the environmental disaster that inspired it. After the terrorist attack, George W. Bush could have called the country to a grand, important new undertaking in which everyone sacrificed personal or regional advantage for the common good. The fact that he only told us to go shopping was the one unforgivable sin of his administration.

O.K., also attacking the wrong country. And creating the deficit. But I digress.

All we got from President Obama was a vague call for some sort of new energy policy. Plus a Gulf Coast Restoration Plan, an oil spill study commission, a reminder that the secretary of energy won a Nobel Prize in physics and 17 references to God, prayer, blessings or faith.

We wanted him to declare war on the oil companies! Every day it becomes clearer that these guys are even more feckless than we imagined. At the ritual Congressional lashing of C.E.O.'s this week, we learned that none of the major oil companies have any idea how to control a spill like this, and that their faux plans for handling one in the gulf were made up of boilerplate so undigested that several had sections on protecting walruses — mammals that have not been seen in the area since the Ice Age. “It's unfortunate that walruses were included,” admitted Exxon Mobil's chief.

The way things have been going, you can't be too careful. If the portents keep piling up, it's easy to envision a headline like: “Lone Tourist in Pensacola Eaten by Visiting Walrus Herd.”

Obama held back on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, he and the BP chairman announced that the company — which is, in theory, only liable for $75 million in economic damage payments — was forgoing its dividend and setting up a $20 billion fund to compensate the workers and businesses who have been harmed by the spill.

In the negotiations, Obama said, he had stressed that for many of the small business owners, families and fishing crews “this is not a matter of dollars and cents, that a lot of these folks don't have a cushion.” His brief remarks were more effective than his 18-minute effort the night before, particularly when coupled with all that cash.

“He is frustrated because he cares about the small people,” said the chairman of BP, who is Swedish. The word choice made the president sound as if he was working on an environmental disaster in Munchkinland.

We are frustrated, too, and it's possible that Obama may never be able to give the speech that will make us feel better. He may never really lace into the oil companies or issue the kind of call to arms on energy that the environmentalists are yearning for.

That's because it won't get him anywhere. Unlike Bush, he has no national consensus to build upon. He'd barely finished his muted remarks on Tuesday before the House minority leader, John Boehner, accused him of exploiting the crisis “to impose a job-killing national energy tax on struggling families and small business.” Michael Steele, the Republican Party chairman, claimed that the president was “manipulating this tragic national crisis for selfish political gain.” And the ever-popular Representative Michele Bachmann denounced the BP restitution fund as “redistribution of wealth” and “one more gateway for government control.”

As a political leader, Barack Obama seems to know what he's doing. His unsatisfying call for a new energy policy sounded very much like the rhetoric on health care reform that used to drive Democrats nuts: open to all ideas, can't afford inaction, if we can put a man on the moon. ... But at the end of that health care slog, he wound up with the groundbreaking law that had eluded his predecessors for decades. The process of wringing it out of Congress was so slow and oblique that even when it was over it was hard to appreciate what he'd won. But win he did.

Ironic. The man we elected because we hoped his feel-good campaign speeches might translate into achievement is actually a guy who is going to achieve, even if his presidential speeches leave us feeling blah.

Gail Collings is as a member of the editorial board and an Op-Ed columnist. Petroleumworld not necessarily share these views.

Editor's Note: This commentary was originally published by The New York Times, June 16, 2010. Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest of our readers

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Petroleumworld News 06/17/2010

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Gail Collings / NYT : The boring speech policy

Gail Collings / NYT :
The boring speech policy