Gulf Still Waiting for Obama to Deliver

Obama’s “Green Energy” speech Tuesday evening was widely panned across the ideological spectrum, raising further doubts that the President has an effective plan for handling the Gulf oil spill.

Obama’s “Green Energy” speech Tuesday evening has been widely panned across the ideological spectrum, with everyone essentially agreeing that the speech was “boring.”

But why was the speech boring? I think it’s because President Obama is completely self-referential and ideologically obsessed. He sees what he wants to see, and not the reality that he needs to see. Consequently, as president, he has completely missed the historical moment.

History now demands a fundamental overhaul and restructuring of the behemoth state. It demands a government that simply does a few things well, and not many things badly. A government that can barely manage delivering the mail, let alone respond effectively to a natural or man-made disaster, is not a government that should be trusted with massive new responsibilities like administering the nation’s healthcare delivery system.

Yet, Obama refuses to see this, because such a constrained or realistic vision would prevent him from pursuing his ideological adventures. It would prevent him from pursuing vast new entitlement programs like “comprehensive national healthcare reform.” It would disrupt his utopian fantasy of a “Green Economy” with millions of well-paying “Green Jobs.”

Yet, great and captivating presidential speeches have in them a sense of history. They recognize what the times demand and they deliver rhetoric and substance that corresponds with history’s calling. Thus Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address spoke to the clear and impending need for national reconciliation and reconstruction in the wake of the Civil War.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with a firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds…

Franklin Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address, likewise, spoke to the need to restore America’s confidence and belief in itself amid the ruins of the greatest economic catastrophe in our nation’s history.

This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself…

John F. Kennedy certainly captured the drama of the Cold War in his First Inaugural Address with his clarion call to

bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Ronald Reagan also echoed history’s calling when he forcefully challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to destroy the Berlin Wall and set free Eastern Europe.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Obama, by contrast, doesn’t want to heed the call of history. Instead, he wants to dictate history. Hence his unmemorable “Green Energy” speech:

The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny. This is not some distant vision for America.

But in fact, it is precisely that. A clean or green energy future is very distant. So distant that it doesn’t yet exist and likely never will exist -- at least not in sufficient volume to supplant or replace oil as America’s primary source of fuel.

The reality is that government bureaucrats simply cannot dictate or plan the energy choices now made by millions of autonomous consumers and financial actors. That’s called central planning, and it simply doesn’t work. Just ask Mikhail Gorbachev. Or consider the sorry state of North Korea where central planning, and not markets, rule.

That’s why Obama’s “Green Energy” speech was a flop which no one will remember. The speech was, in essence, ahistorical. It was ideologically driven and not attuned to the historical reality of the here and now. And that’s been the problem with the entire Obama presidency.

Candidate Obama promised to be non-ideological and pragmatic. He pledged to do what works, and not what ideology demands. And that’s why, I think, Candidate Obama delivered far better and more memorable speeches: because he was then more in tune with history’s calling.

Think back, for instance, to January 3, 2008, when candidate Obama delivered his victory speech in Iowa. Obama’s speech that night was great because it corresponded perfectly with the historical moment. Indeed, the speech spoke to our collective yearning to transcend our differences -- political, ethnic, racial, and religious differences -- to become truly one people with a common, unifying purpose and birthright.

You know, they said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.

But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do….

In lines that stretched around schools and churches, in small towns and in big cities, you came together as Democrats, Republicans and independents, to stand up and say that we are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come...

Because we are not a collection of red states and blue states. We are the United States of America. And in this moment, in this election, we are ready to believe again.

What great lines! And so beautifully delivered. Americans back then certainly were ready to believe in Barack Obama; and many of us still want to believe in the man we elected to be our president.

But as the pragmatic, unifying candidate recedes into memory, and as the ideological, “transformative” leader becomes more manifest, increasing numbers of Americans are giving up on hope and change. They are giving up on Barack Obama. They refuse, however, to give up on America. And that is why, one day, we again will have a president who captures the historical moment.