{"id":666,"date":"2010-06-22T14:00:55","date_gmt":"2010-06-22T21:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/?p=666"},"modified":"2010-08-23T12:27:47","modified_gmt":"2010-08-23T19:27:47","slug":"gulf-oil-speech-administration-dead-in-the-water-hughhewitt-com-06-22-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/2010\/06\/22\/gulf-oil-speech-administration-dead-in-the-water-hughhewitt-com-06-22-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Gulf Oil Speech: Administration Dead in the Water | HughHewitt.com | 06.21.10"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is no news now, but on Tuesday last week, President Obama delivered the least effective Oval Office address since Jimmy Carter\u2019s \u201cmalaise\u201d speech. \u00a0Why?<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t just the awkward use of his hands, the hackneyed and inappropriate wartime metaphors, the equally banal \u201cif we could land a man on the moon\u201d drivel. \u00a0All that was bad enough, but more devastating was the gulf between obvious fact and the speech\u2019s fiction. \u00a0These \u2014 shall we call them misspeakings \u2014 were coupled with more of the administration\u2019s increasingly off-putting crisis default setting: That everything bad was Bush\u2019s fault. \u00a0Our son was two when we stopped accepting that kind of excuse in our house. \u00a0This administration is almost two, but it\u2019s been talking for longer than our son when we told him to stop the excuses.<\/p>\n<p>Here is a list of questions that occurred to me during the speech and that even the most junior White House speechwriters should have seen as implicit in the text and hit the delete button:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The speech suggested that the      Administration was on top of the oil-spill situation from day one, with      the Energy Secretary (co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics,      awarded &#8220;for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser      light&#8221;) heading the effort to trap oil gushing from the Gulf floor      and floating toward our southern shores. \u00a0Doesn\u2019t that mean that      hundreds of elected officials in the states involved, thousands of      journalists, and millions of Americans failed to notice this all out      effort until last night?<\/li>\n<li>The speech started by saluting      our \u201cbrave men and women in uniform\u201d who are \u201ctaking the fight to al      Qaeda\u201d. \u00a0But part of that fight is diverting American oil dollars      from the Middle East so they can\u2019t fuel terrorism. \u00a0In shutting down      deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, hasn\u2019t the White House gone AWOL      in that part of the battle?<\/li>\n<li>The speech outlined a course of      action that sets aside current laws for dealing with oil spills.      \u00a0Some may say that this emergency is too big to worry about the law,      but out of curiosity, what is the White House\u2019s legal authority for      demanding that BP put money into an independent escrow account controlled      by the government, and insisting that BP pay the wages of those affected by      the White House ordered shutdown of deepwater drilling? \u00a0Other than      making the administration look in charge, why was the carefully crafted      oil spill law (developed after the wreck of the Exxon Valdez) simply      ignored in the week prior to the address\u00a0in favor of huffing and puffing and threats of boots on the neck and kicked rear ends?<\/li>\n<li>The speech said that \u201cwe are      running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water&#8230; [a]nd that&#8217;s      part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface      of the ocean.\u201d \u00a0Aren\u2019t there hundreds, even thousands, of such sites,      but few, if any, for which the U.S. government is willing to issue permits?      \u00a0Wasn\u2019t the speech\u2019s message that the government is going to stick      to, not change, that <em>status quo<\/em>?<\/li>\n<li>The speech talked about \u201ccosts      associated with the transition\u201d away from dependence on foreign oil and      decried those who say we can\u2019t afford those costs. \u00a0By halting deep      water drilling and pushing all liability onto the oil company involved wasn\u2019t the speech saying that the government would pay no price and bear      no burden \u2014 even those costs and burdens that its regulations and      ineptness impose \u2014 to achieve energy independence?<\/li>\n<li>And to repeat, the speech      employed the metaphor of war throughout. \u00a0In what way is cleaning up      a lot of oil like a war, unless the speechwriter intended to suggest KP duty?      \u00a0Is not our real war against global forces that are funded in large      part via Middle Eastern money, money that comes from the oil trade?      \u00a0Isn\u2019t using the accident as an excuse for policies that will push      drilling out of the United States a form of surrender in that war, the      real war?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here is a lesson I learned writing speeches in the Reagan White House: Public communications is a highly sensitive, delicate thing. \u00a0If the logic of your text is not tight, if you deviate even slightly from what your audience knows to be true, if in making your case you seem to look down on your audience and try to play slight of hand with their concerns, you are dead in the water.<\/p>\n<p>Last Tuesday night, President Obama was dead in the water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is no news now, but on Tuesday last week, President Obama delivered the least effective Oval Office address since Jimmy Carter\u2019s \u201cmalaise\u201d speech. \u00a0Why? It wasn\u2019t just the awkward use of his hands, the hackneyed and inappropriate wartime metaphors, the equally banal \u201cif we could land a man on the moon\u201d drivel. \u00a0All that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication-strategy","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":668,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions\/668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}