and said let s have project independence. let s wean ourselves off foreign oil by 1980. didn t happen. what obama is trying to do, which is classic obama, not overpromise and set a goal by which he will be judged in which we can t meet. who was his speech aimed at mostly? was it the american people or bp executives? who is his big audience here? i think if you have to get to the core, certainly the people in the four states that are particularly suffering and, also, a big wrap on obama the last number of weeks that he has not been engaged enough. 53 emergency ro 53% of americans thought his performance in this crisises was poor or very poor. chris, in the end, results are what are going to matter. this is a version of carter crisis. he gave speech after speech and until the hostages got out, same thing.
everything that everybody wanted to hear and yet there was this reaction that was just so starkly different from across the board absolutely, the criticism. at this point it seems almost frustrating. what do people want him from him? if you talk to people in the gulf, perhaps they ll hear something different. i did read some of the editorials and he laid out the things he wants to do for us but he didn t tell us how he s going to do it. everyone said he s too much of alprofessor and you can t run this country being a law professor. please, he did whaut fits for him. you know a president speaks, every word measured. the one thing we ve learned with barack obama and our connections with the white house is a lot of
specifics about his plans for restoring the unique beauty and bounty of this region, quote/unquote. a gulf coast restoration plan will be developed soon but what is that exactly and how soon will we see it activated? the president can only address so much in 20 minutes. here s the point about that editorial. president obama is doing everything he possibly can to get to the source of fixing all of this and that s the money and who s going to pay. now, we are seeing this big confrontation unfolding today in the white house. we re going to find out who has more power. a multi-national corporation that does whatever it wants with the congress or the president of the united states who is trying to stand with the people and make this right. i think the president hit all the right notes in the time allotted last night. it was big picture and it was visionary and not supposed it be about detail and minutia.
constituents, don t you think? there s anger. but congress needs to rise above the anger and figure out how to get things done and that s still what we re waiting to hear. nobody knows how to cap it yet and i don t blame president obama for that. he didn t cause the leak. an oval office address is a terrible thing to waste and i think he wasted it. why? because if he had given a very similar speech in the first week of this and if he had brought out those executives from the oil companies in immediately after the leak, then he would have been ahead of this. then he would have been seen as directing and leading our country and the effort to blame the oil companies much better received. they are at fault and do have cullpability here. it is too late for president obama, that s the president. the events right now are so much bigger than him. you know that things come and go and they re up and down and they change and it s a little too soon, isn t it, to say that it s too late? n
am i hearing you right? the historic moment, potentially, for his presidency was not last night it s today, right now inside the oval office and what happens coming out of there? no question about it. a series of things are going to take place. the president informed the country last night what we re doing, where we re going forward and how this is all going to unfold. today is the next step and he also said that it is going to get capped. the president s not going to give details on how exactly he is going to do it. he is putting his credibility on line with the american people that these things are going to happen and if they don t happen we will render judgment whether he has the ability to lead us out of this crisis which will cripple our economy, if we don t. ed, thanks. i know you will have more reaction and analysis and what happened today later tonight at 6:00 p.m. eastern on the ed show. let s bring in ari fleischer. i want to ask you because you ve been inside the w