President Obama's Tuesday night Oval Office speech was a bipartisan flop.
It was booed on the left by NYT's Maureen Dowd, Salon's Robert Reich, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, Politico's Roger Simon and Slate's John Dickerson.
One left-wing pundit, Paul Begala, liked it, but Begala's comic book hero description is so far into the deep weeds, so redolent of dictator worship, it may do more harm than good.
He hangs back, holds back, resists fully engaging. His supporters get nervous, then edgy, then panicky. And then he swoops in to save the day.
Did Begala really write that? Whooboy.
On the political right, Obama's speech was slammed by Bloomberg's Caroline Baum, American Spectator's Ben Stein and New York Post's Michael Goodwin. The free market right questions whether Obama has any constitutional authority to seize $30 billion of BP shareholder equity. There can only be two explanations for Obama's big demand. One, he's bluffing from the bully pulpit--a president's right to do. Two, Obama really does buy into Paul Begala's love poem that presidents (Democrat presidents, anyway) are supermen who fly above the law.
Watching an insufferably arrogant president fall to earth, cape and all, might be funny except for two things.
-- More than 2 million gallons of oil are still leaking into the Gulf each day.
-- America's enemies around the world look at Obama's lack of command and sinking poll numbers--a new low of 42% reported by Rasmussen on Wednesday--and figure now is the time to test America and push hard. Consider the jumped-up aggression of North Korea, al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran and Venezuela. Step back and study the outline: It is all of a piece.
One has to go back to Gerald Ford/Jimmy Carter's America in the 1970s or Stanley Baldwin/Neville Chamberlain's England in the 1930s to see how weak leadership at home emboldened bad guys around the globe.
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