BP Speech: Our Storyteller in Chief?

In one hour, Obama addresses the nation about the BP Oil Spill. My question about the speech is simple: “How big will he go?” A commitment to energy sector regulation reform? Or something bigger — like a firm commitment to pass comprehensive carbon pricing by the end of the year? Is this going to be, as Joe Scarborough hopes for, Obama’s “JFK Speech” where he calls for total energy independence by the end of the decade?

At this point, I honestly wonder what he — Obama himself — is capable of. Again and again, he’s failed to tell the story of our moment, to give us the why us? why now?vocabulary that structures and clarifies the task at hand, gives us a sense of place, impels us to action. That’s what the best stories do. That’s what the best leaders do. Sometimes, frankly, it doesn’t even seem like he’s trying. I was waiting all year for him to tell the story of the stimulus package, of health care reform, of financial regulation; we got the facts, but never the narrative. Can anyone remember a single metaphor, or even a single phrase, that Obama used in over a year and a half to describe his reforms?

One of the more lamentable aspects of the the press’ BP Oil Spill coverage has been the repeated conflation of “looking like a leader” and “talking to the American people.” The first (as I’ve argued before) is rightly understood as “bullshit” (in the precise meaning of that phrase); the second, however, is an absolutely essential aspect of the president’s job. Obama disdains the former and forgets the latter.

Not being a superhero who can, as Nick Kristof has helpfully suggested, swim down to the oil leak with skivvies on and a knife in his mouth and punch out the hole, Obama is left with more pedestrian means. It’s well within the “material conception” of politics — the idea that politics is primarily about getting things done, an idea that Obama holds — to say that the president has few powers greater than his access to the American people.

Yet the Administration has massively underutilized this power. The Administration is openly dismissive of the press’ demand for theater politics, and rightly so (Axelrod to the NYTimes: “I don’t give a ‘flying’ expletive ‘about what the peanut gallery thinks’”); yet in dismissing the media, they often dismiss its role as a conduit to the American people. Almost every reporter whose been given access to the Administration comments on how hermetic it is, how few people Obama talks to in the course of a day, how businesslike and technocratic it is, even at the cost of its link to outside world. In his classic analysis, George Packer wrote, at the end of Obama’s Year One:

Part of Obama’s weakness has been this unwillingness or inability to say a few simple things passionately, which would let Americans know that he is on their side. Reagan knew how to do it, which meant that, even when his popularity was sinking at a similar point in his presidency (remember 1982?), the public still knew where he stood, not necessarily on the details of policy, but on a few core principles that he could at least pretend never to sacrifice.

Let’s see if Obama can change that tonight. Let’s see if he can tell the story of our moment.