I wrote about it for the New York Post today. An excerpt:

In a peculiar instance of synchronicity, President Obama’s Oval Office speech to the nation last night resembled the very calamity it was intended to address: Like the oil spewing into the Gulf, it began as a focused and narrow stream of words — and quickly spread out into an amorphous cloud of goo.
What started as a just-the-facts-ma’am explanation quickly got caught up in political currents — by the end we were treated to bromides about the Greatest Generation and putting a man on the moon and preposterous insinuations that the Red Chinese will turn Green before us. (China, mind you, is the country where the rivers burn, the air is crunchy and the government is building a new, filthy, coal-fired power plant every 10 days for the next decade).
Last night we saw just the latest installment of “Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste,” written by Rahm Emanuel and performed by The One. The immediate goal: to create the political climate where BP will bend over and say “thank you sir, may I have another” in perpetuity. Beyond that, to browbeat the public and Congress into accepting some version of cap-and-trade legislation that will export jobs and raise energy prices in the middle of a recession.
If we could defeat Hitler, we can hike your utility bills! If we could put a man on the moon, we can put an American manufacturing job in India! Yes, we can!
This points to the intractability of the political mess Obama is in. The White House desperately wants to focus on job creation and fiscal responsibility, or at least appear that way. But Obama’s agenda incontinently blows in the opposite direction, and every other direction as well.

A couple points I couldn’t quite squeeze in. Physically, I thought he came across low-energy and almost perfunctory. Part of the problem is that Obama’s conceptual cadences and formulations are all-too-familiar now, bleeding into one-another to the point where even though he might be talking about a new subject, he still seems to be saying the same thing over and over again. Ken Green nailed this point last night over at the Enterprise Blog.

Jay Leno had a line last night that I think will capture a lot of people’s attitudes toward this address. It went something like this (quoting from memory): “President Obama announced tonight that he wants to use the oil spill to move America toward green energy. I have a crazy idea. Maybe he should use the oil spill crisis to fix the oil spill.”

One last point: By all means, BP should pay for its mistakes. But the White House treatment of the company has really become indefensibly political. The administration talks about the need to force BP to pay what it owes and not ignore valid claims when, to date, I’ve seen no evidence that BP has scrimped on paying anything. It amounts to changing the subject. And commencing with a criminal investigation is just in excusable at this point, if your chief goal is to fix the leak. Suddenly forcing BP to spend even more time and resources on CYA measures helps nothing save, perhaps, Obama’s poll numbers.