Obama Is President Again

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

03 March 12

his was a tough room if you showed up to talk energy policy, which the president did in a snowstorm on Thursday afternoon. The Nashua Community College gym was packed early with people who were so overdressed for the footlights that one of them keeled over in the middle of the crowd just as the president was beginning to speak. Once he got started, you could close your eyes and predict what was going to happen during his speech. Any mention of natural gas, and somebody would yell, "No fracking!" Wild applause ensued every time Wall Street oil speculators took a hiding. Uncontrolled joy broke out any time the president took a whack at Congress for doing nothing, or simply for not doing what he wanted.

After several months of watching the Republican primary process, I can't tell you what a cool breeze it was to watch a politician who looks at a crowd and doesn't see a group of potential marks (Romney), a collection of your fellow Elect marching with you through the dystopic Sinai that is America (Santorum), a gaggle of goldbugs (Paul), or the class of half-bright sophomores that N. Leroy Gingrich sees every time he looks anywhere but into the mirror. Barack Obama is not stiff. He is not bristling with unbridled id. He grins. He kids people, even the people who faint at the beginning of his speeches. ("Always have something to eat before going to see the president," he said.) He is relaxed about the job of politics. He is the only president of the United States - real or prospective - that I've seen in months.

If that is the way Obama's going to run, somebody's giving him good advice again. He talks about the challenges Americans face, but he doesn't do it in the gloom-ridden, stalactite-festooned, minor-key funeral mass context that the Republicans talk about them. He talks in terms of "boundless ingenuity" and "unbridled optimism." This is the way Ronald Reagan spoke on the stump in 1980. Sure, Jimmy Carter sent the country to hell in an handbasket but, by god, the work of climbing out of the handbasket was going to be fun. For all the Reagan cargo-cultism of the Republican party, this is the part of the old goober's charm than none of the Republican candidate have yet mastered. It's become an instinct in the president now.

It was striking to compare how the president talked to the students here with the now-famous Rick Santorum dickery about how he is a "snob" for wanting as many people as possible to go to college. The president talked to these students at an out-of-the-way community college as though they're all going to waltz right out of here and into the Apollo program. "I see the young people here - and the ones that are young at heart," he said. "We need you to study hard, and to work hard, and to summon up that unbridled optimism that led previous generations to overcome the challenges of their time."

On energy policy, he walked a very fine line. He talked about how the country's dependence on foreign oil had dropped since he became president, even passing out a chart - "we'll be using visual aids today" - to that effect. He talked about all the wells that have been drilled and all the pipelines that have been built and all the permits for drilling and pipelines that his administration is planning to hand out, which nearly lost him the crowd. He got it back by talking about the regulations he's put in place "to make sure we don't have a spill like we had in the Gulf a while back." He made no mention of the Keystone XL pipeline, except to point out that he'd given permission to open a pipeline in Oklahoma that may one day be part of the larger project. The "all of the above" strategy is going to be truly that, which means it's not going to make everybody happy.

But what truly got them on their feet was a thwacking attack on the $4 billion in subsidies that the federal government gives to the oil companies every year. "Those companies are making record profits right now," he said. "Anyone here think Congress should still give them $4 billion a year? That's outrageous. It's inexcusable. I want them to vote on those in the next couple of weeks. Let your member of Congress know where you stand, New Hampshire. I know where I stand.

"It's not going to be a long, smooth road. Some companies will fail. [Low bridge there for Solyndra.] Some experiments won't work all the time. But as long as I'm president, I am not going to walk away from clean energy. I won't see the markets for solar, wind, and battery technologies go to China because some politicians don't want to take the chance on them. With or without this Congress, I'm going to do everything I can. They've got their business. I've got you."

Except for, occasionally, Ron Paul, none of the Republicans talk like this. Oh, they talk about common purpose and common sacrifice, but they don't seem to have any goal for all the effort except to replace the president with one of them. This was a speech, a run-of-the-mill campaign stop, that was impervious to the kind of sidetracking and bombast that has made such an unpleasant circus act out of the doings on the other side. It was a centrist speech, to be sure, but one hung thick with banners and ribbons and summer band concert music. Elsewhere, of course, the funeral march moves on toward Ohio and Super Tuesday.