Oil Pan

I tuned in to President Obama's speech about the Gulf of Mexico last night expecting a major address that would join John F. Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis speech of 1962 and Ronald Reagan's Challenger speech of 1986 among the memorable Oval Office addresses in the history of American television. What I got was something that kind of reminded me of that 1989 address by George Bush when he held up a bag of crack to underscore the seriousness of illegal drugs and didn't say much.

President Obama made a strong case for going against BP in getting them to clean up and pay for their oil leak, but when it came to explaining how we as a nation would get through this mess and how we would chart a new course in terms of an energy policy, Obama offered new specifics and plenty of vagaries, re-iterating his commitment to a green economy and evading the question of whether or not he would support carbon taxes and "cap and trade" gas emission regulation in an energy bill that has stalled in the Senate over these two issues.

In short, anyone expecting a bold new energy policy initiative that would take a lot of political will to put across was bitterly disappointed. I was. So were a lot of people; the Republicans accused Obama of platitudinous posturing, and progressives bemoaned the lack of specifics in the speech about how we were going to make the transition to clean energy. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) even expressed disappointment in Obama's failure to mention proposals Republicans can get behind, such as nuclear energy and electric cars.

Pundits and politicians panned this speech as unanimously as popular music critics would pan a Michael Bolton album. The White House said this speech wasn't intended for pundits and politicians, but I can only wonder who was meant for. It was probably meant for religious fishermen, if Obama's reference to the annual blessings of fishing fleets in Louisiana were any indication, and he even invoked God in the hope that we could set things right.

With President Norman Vincent Obama having spoken, it seems our only hope of getting any energy legislation passed this year or any year is letting Congress pass a bill so weak, it will do for energy policy what the health care reform law did for that issue. That is, not much.

And the green economy? We have one already. But it's cold cash, not photosynthesis, that makes our economy green.