President Obama, who I personally want to believe is a good, smart man in an incredibly difficult job, trying to lead a nation beset with a whole menu of disasters and challenges in a world confronted with even more, made his first Oval Office address to the nation tonight, and I sat down to watch it with an incredible amount of hope that he could recapture with it the spirit of the night of his election, when change and progress seemed possible again.
This speech didn't do it, for me at least, and it didn't do it because something was missing, and what was missing mattered.
What was missing was the big picture, the place each of us occupy in it, and the steps we each have to take to make change happen.
It's very dangerous that he didn't or couldn't get that across to us in this speech. The worst possibility, one I'm almost afraid to contemplate, is that he has no idea about those things.
More below the fold.
At the end of March, after President Obama's announcement on approving more offshore drilling, I posted a diary:
My diary commenting on Obama's offshore drilling announcement
I could call myself Cassandra, because I read it now and weep, but I'd been taking and I took for that diary the now-usual rash of "you're a hater" or "get with the Obama program" comments from the contingent here who firmly insists we should all be loyal true believers or at worst we should STFU.
Myself, I was feeling at that time incredibly let down. As that diary showed, I found the Obama administration failing to vigorously implement or to seriously pursue forging a national consensus on most of the progressive goals on the Democratic agenda. I had been disappointed by many of his choices for cabinet positions, by the Wall Street insiders who seemed to dominate his highest levels of advisors on the economy, by the lack of real help to real people facing foreclosure or unemployment, by the conduct and results of the health care reform effort, and then by the decision to approve offshore drilling. In those last two items in particular, it seemed to me that the Obama administration caved before the fight even was engaged, compromised right out of the gate.
In sum, what concerned me was an overall impression that President Obama and his administration were giving too much away, because they are NOT picking up on the deep disaffection that put him into office, that inspires the popularity of the tea party and the rage against incumbents: the big picture concept that America is not making progress but that we are stagnating, that our jobs have been stolen, that we are now run by corporate elites and that that the government is useless (or worse).
We've had so many crises and situations in a row in which it has become obvious that the interests of large corporations and ordinary Americans are at odds. Start with Iraq (which did well for Haliburton, Blackwater, Bechtel etc. but not so well for the rest of us), go on to Katrina (where our tax dollars purchased toxic trailers), climate change, the mortgage crisis and its global aftermath (complete with bailouts and TARP and obscene executive bonuses), and now the Gulf oil spill (courtesy of feckless BP).
Yet this administration WILL NOT or CAN NOT competently articulate the fact that we MUST, MUST, MUST reverse a quarter century or more of intensive deregulation that has left ordinary Americans staring into the abyss while corporate CEOs do a flyover of whatever the current the disaster scene happens to be on their private jets. And if they can't even articulate it, how can they effectively act on it?
As I said in my previous diary, it's not as if in every case the evidence is not right out there to be seen by anyone who looks. My previous diary was just a snippet of information and yet it clearly showed how risky Obama's drilling approval was likely to be.
Tonight, after a speech that had the opportunity to galvanize us, I'm forced to ask, if he couldn't appreciate the scientists' and the progressives' evaluation of the risk that was out there, if this spill disaster happening can't inspire him to find a voice that helps all Americans see the big picture, what on earth can? Why was this speech a boring policy wonk list enunciation that helped no one understand how our nation and our people got into this whole mess on all its fronts and what we have to do to get out???
The fisherman or hotel worker who faces the incoming oil knows it has to be cleaned up, yes, of course, but he or she also knows deep down that it never should have been allowed to spill. And deep down, that American also knows that there is yet another disaster lurking in another deregulated industry out there waiting to happen. But the President didn't talk about that, did he?
And I do NOT, do NOT understand why. So I am still feeling screwed, maybe more than before.