Charles Ellison
+ FollowIn Search of the Right Stuff
By many accounts, from talk shows to water coolers, President Obama’s measured remarks in his first Oval Office address on Tuesday night didn’t appear to live up to the Churchillian expectations many expected. If it was a movie, critics would be somewhat unfair in describing it as badly acted or giving it multiple thumbs down, but we’d understand if they didn’t give it any rating at all.
Was it his worst public speaking performance? Not really – it was well written, but it certainly is, some two days later, the performance you forgot. Unlike his State of the Union and, for sure, unlike his glorious post-campaign speeches in Denver and Chicago’s Grant Park, it’s simply not registering in the minds of a weary American public. A scientific gauge of that shows in the pure numbers: viewership for this event was down 33% from his State of the Union, down 21% from the Afghanistan troop surge speech. While 32 million folks tuned in, it won’t go unnoticed that more than the fair share tuned out.
This is where the President gets bogged down in the mud of his own expectations game. Candidate Obama created colorful visuals of the sky being the limit; anything was possible, the American imagination immense. Executive Obama, two years later, doesn’t bring that tone to his governing style, particularly when it comes to the oil spill. Everything’s managed, decisions made for the middle ground, words spoken in such a way as to ensure the guarantee of a second term. It is what it is.
There could be a number of good reasons for this. Within the context of the Oval Office, it just wasn’t his day or setting – perhaps he’d have managed better with a small audience cheering him on for call and response validation. Mark McKinnon makes this point in the Daily Beast:
There’s a ‘Man In The Arena’ quality to the setting. No audience. No feedback. Just one camera. No cut-aways. It’s a high wire act. It had to be really important. And the president had to really be good.”
Presidents should use the Oval Office selectively. It has the weight and bearing of the Pope giving a special Mass at the Vatican. It’s not the place to announce volunteerism awards. It’s not a place for updates. It’s a place to announce serious plans.
Hence, the address literally fell to a flat monotone, much like the muffled non-words of Peanuts parents you never see, but know are there. The New York Times’ Peter Baker writes:
His enemies were oil industry lobbyists and corrupt regulators, foreign energy suppliers and conservative policy makers, and a stubborn gushing well at the bottom of the sea. And ultimately, he was fighting his own powerlessness, as a president castigated for failing to stop the nation’s worst-ever oil spill tried to turn disaster into opportunity.
While laying out his “battle plan” to break “this siege” from a spill “assaulting our shores,” the commander in chief hoped to pivot from defense to offense, using the still-unresolved crisis in the Gulf of
Mexico to press for sweeping change in energy policy.
But, did the “battle plan” contain the specificity some yearned for? Even though the language added a new sense of urgency to the spill, it didn’t quite pitch the vision of American troops storming Normandy beaches. The President’s sense of “powerlessness” reflects the same from a tired American public watching live, blackened shots of unstopped oil flow. Which partly explains the reason why the announcement of the $20 billion escrow fund or the $100 million oil rig workers compensation fund hasn’t sunk in, yet.
That’s a big step in the right direction – until we hear the stories of stymied claims and money lost to contractors or small business subsidiaries of BP and other oil interests. But, do we really get a sense that the President is the one exercising executive command over this situation? Is this a “national call to arms?” Is it a clear, inspiring, horn-blowing moment where our collective imagination is triggered to do much more than create a commission of experts, pass a climate change bill and gradually pull ourselves from oil? One can’t dismiss the contradiction lurking in the President’s address: while celebrating the historic glory of our ability to mobilize industry during World War II and our successful attempt at landing on the Moon, we seemed content not to apply similar fervor. Is national motivation confined to the history books? Do we not have “the right stuff” in 2010 that we had in 1944 or 1969?
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This movie looks awesome! I hope to see a lot of Jascha Washington in it!