Obama's Great Speech-Even MSNBC Hated It

Gary Fouse
fousesquawk


Barack Obama reminds me of the smooth-talking traveling salesman-the guy who talks his way through your front door and proceeds to talk his way right out the back door. This week, his speech fell flat not just to Fox News, but even the mad hatters at MSNBC hated it. (Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman). When even Chris Matthews doesn't get that tingling down his leg, you've failed. The inspiring rhetoric has now fallen on deaf ears. In his speech, Barack Obama might as well have been speaking to a nation-wide audience of oysters.

Obama covered three areas, which may be summarized as follows:

1 Clean up- From Day One we have been doing a great job-30,000 people, millions of feet of boom, ect (They are not. It's a mess)

2 Gulf Coast restoration- Blue ribbon commission to be headed by ex-Mississippi Governor Ray Mabus. Yawn.

3 Make sure it never happens again, from which he segued into the need to switch to clean energy (wind turbines, solar, etc).

In addition, he told us how he and Ken Salazar have been reforming the MMS agency that for a decade had been corrupt and in bed with the oil companies. Translation? Blame George W Bush.

He also told how he is going to dictate to BP that they set up an escrow fund to pay for the damage. Of course, he has no authority to do so, but BP will probably agree for purposes of PR if nothing else.

Bottom line? Obama has very little clue as what he should do, so he made a speech, which is what he used to do best.

Look, I, as much as anyone, would like to see us switch to cars that could run on peanut butter or anything else but oil. But we are talking about the here and now. No windmill is going to blow my car down the road. The sad fact is that the world runs on oil and we need it. We can't continue to keep buying it from Saudi Arabia and all those other lousy countries that don't even like us. We need to produce our own oil while we develop this elusive alternative clean energy. Drilling in the middle of the ocean (thanks to the environmentalists) has produced a leak that nobody can plug for 4-5 months. We should be drilling off the coast and in Alaska. Then, when that new source of clean energy is developed, we can celebrate the end of oil.

America is finally learning that you can't run a country on great speeches.