Two years ago presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered his “America, This Is Our Moment” stump speech with the now famous lines:

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

After a year and a half as President, Mr. Obama has not been able to provide jobs for the jobless. The $787 billion economic stimulus he and his Democrats enacted has failed to put people back to work, except for the lucky few who found jobs working for the federal government. They also pushed through a massive and expensive federally-mandated health care bill, but it is yet to be determined how many of the sick will benefit from it. A majority of Americans are not convinced, and they want it repealed. Last night President Barack Obama delivered his first speech from the Oval Office, and an anxious nation tuned in to hear how he would address the oceans and the healing of the planet, specifically the increasingly oily Gulf of Mexico, its estuaries and beaches, which are sorely in need of healing. How did he do?

Howard Fineman’s Newsweek magazine and the MSNBC liberal Democrat duo of Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann have been among President Obama’s most enthusiastic and faithful cheerleaders, so their negative reactions to the Oval Office speech indicate that this president is in deep waters and, like much of the oil-soaked wildlife along the country’s southern shores, unable to swim or even float.

Fineman wrote on Newsweek’s political blog The Gaggle last night that Obama’s speech fell “curiously” flat:

Isn’t Obama the guy who was studying up so he could kick some a##? Ok, if it’s not BP, who is it, other than some hapless congressional bureaucrat who he appointed only a few months ago to head the Minerals Management Service?

And where was the battlefield report? FDR and Churchill pored over the maps, knew the troop strengths, knew where the ships were at sea. What evidence is there that this president, famous for his grasp of detail, had that kind of interest in, or stomach for, this war?

Yes, the sad truth is that this well is still mostly unstoppable. It turns out, catastrophically, that BP tapped into the Moby Dick of deep-ocean gushers, and Obama doesn’t want to play the role of Ahab. But he has no choice. He is captain.

Fineman also contributed some post-speech analysis with Matthews and Olbermann last night on MSNBC.  Here’s a sampling of their reactions to the presidential address:

Olbermann: “It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days.”

Matthews compared Obama to Carter.

Olbermann: “Nothing specific at all was said.”

Matthews: “No direction.”

Howard Fineman: “He wasn’t specific enough.”

Olbermann: “I don’t think he aimed low, I don’t think he aimed at all. It’s startling.”

Howard Fineman: Obama should be acting like a “commander-in-chief.”

Matthews: Ludicrous that he keeps saying [Secretary of Energy] Chu has a Nobel prize. “I’ll barf if he does it one more time.”

Matthews: “A lot of meritocracy, a lot of blue ribbon talk.”

Matthews: “I don’t sense executive command.”

A video clip of the segment is here.

The White House has good reason to be worried about the president’s performance last night. If you’re Barack Obama, and you’ve lost Newsweek and MSNBC, then you’re as hapless as an oil-soaked pelican in the Gulf of Mexico.

- JP

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