Obama has Vision Concerning the BP Oil Spill

Charles Krauthammer:

Barack Obama doesn't do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian "I feel your pain," a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting. It wasn't until the end of the speech -- the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda -- that Obama warmed to his task.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy. And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around. With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.

Krauthammer brings us back to reality in the rest of the piece and ends with.

That's why Tuesday's speech was received with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality. The gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destinations. That passes for vision, and vision is Obama's thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.

Rich Lowry on the bursting of a great "Liberal Hubris Bubble":

In his new book, The Icarus Syndrome, author Peter Beinart writes of “hubris bubbles” that infect American foreign policy after successes. In the domestic arena, liberalism has been riding its most expansive hubris bubble since Lyndon Johnson modestly declared on the cusp of the Great Society, “These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born.”

Those millennial expectations returned with the honeyed words of Obama. . . .

If landing a man on the moon proves government can do practically anything, what does it prove that it can’t get the right kind of boom to the right places and deploy it properly in the Gulf? What does it say that the Environmental Protection Agency couldn’t get its story straight on what kind of dispersant BP could use on the oil? What does it show that it took weeks for the government to approve the building of protective sand berms by Louisiana?