How’d he do? As always, the answer seems to depend on where you’re sitting. Environmentalists were disappointed, centrists were pleased but skeptical, conservatives in the business sphere just want the problems solved so we can get back to business.

And the political right appeared to be responding to a completely different speech (in an alternate universe in which Obama caused the oil leak and is now using that as an excuse to RAISE YOUR TAXES!). Editorial cartoonist Tom Toles’ take (next to this column) appeared a few days ago, but pretty accurately sums up the reaction from Beltway Republicans.

(Read our summary of the main points of President Obama’s speech)

Politico (centerish, DC website)

“His language was notably muscular – calling the spill an “epidemic” and an “assault’ on the Gulf, and his response a “battle plan” to fix it – and he sought to equate the level of the national response to triumphs past, such as World War II and the moon missions.” [social_buttons]

Ezra Klein (liberal, Washington Post):

Noting that Obama’s use of language was similar to his calls for the final push for health care reform, Klein says environmentalists should be optimistic that the President is serious about getting a bill passed – even if he didn’t lay out any specifics.

He also did not utter the words “climate change” or “global warming.” The closest Obama got was to praise the House for “passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill – a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.” The section of his speech devoted to the issue avoided the politically-controversial problem in order to focus on the broadly-popular solution: Clean energy… Obama did not make any specific promises about the bill he would support, or even that he wanted. He did not say he would price carbon, or that we should get a certain percentage of our energy from renewables by a certain date.

Joseph B. White (conservative, Wall Street Journal)

Watch this trick: Obama endorses energy action without exactly endorsing the climate change / cap and trade bill passed by the House. He’s happy to look at other ideas. Sounds like health care, Chapter 1.

Ben Adler (liberal, Newsweek)

“Obama Chickens Out on Energy”: President Obama eloquently laid out the case that we have failed to confront our dependence on fossil fuels, and that now is the time for us to do so. Obama acknowledged that the our failure to do this so far has been caused not just obeisance to entrenched interests, but also “a lack of political courage and candor.”

But he failed to use this opportunity to marshal public support for a logical, tangible goal that would reduce our destructive consumption of oil and coal. As Obama noted, he campaigned on, and the House of Representatives passed, a bill that would finally put a cap on U.S. carbon emissions. So you would think that Obama must surely have gone on to note that the bill is now stuck in the Senate, where it has not gained the super-majority under the extra-constitutional requirement enforced in this Congress by Republicans and conservative Democrats. You would be wrong.

Dave Roberts (liberal, Grist magazine)

Normally Obama’s energy pitch includes ritual nods to ‘clean coal,’ nuclear power, and domestic drilling. None of those made an appearance last night; it was only energy efficiency and renewable energy. That strikes me as a deliberate (and welcome) message to the Senate about what Obama wants on the energy side of a bill.

Michael Steele (conservative, chairman of the Republican Nation Committee)

“Exploiting the tragedy in the Gulf to try to ram through a devastating job-killing national energy tax is more of the same Chicago-style politics that has the President’s approval ratings plummeting to an all-time low.”

How many irrelevant buzzwords can we fit into one sentence? This stuff may play well to the hard-core base of the party, but leaves independents who just want the problem taken care of scratching their heads…

Brian Wingfield (conservative, Washington Bureau Chief for Forbes business magazine)

President Obama used his address to get his feet back under him. But now the long journey to cleaning up the Gulf begins.

Erick Erickson (conservative, RedState.com)

[Obama] hopes you will ignore what Steven Hayward has pointed out at AEI — very little crude oil goes into producing energy in America to keep lights on. Most oil goes to fueling our cars. Windmills, nuclear reactors, and solar panels will not fuel our cars. If we don’t extract the oil, we will grow more and more dependent on Hugo Chavez and Iranian President I’manutjob. I realize he doesn’t want a crisis to go to waste, but his priorities are clearly not those of the rest of the nation.

Bill O’Reilly vs Sarah Palin (conservative, Fox News)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/QfTTckgn-mo&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

The Economist (conservative, European weekly magazine)

In the end, I think there wasn’t much the president could do to reassure the public in this speech. He laid out the government’s actions, which are substantial. And yet the oil creeps closer to America’s shores. Thus, you get the president of a Louisiana parish wondering (on CNN) why it takes weeks instead of days to skim the oil. “We’re working on it with everything we’ve got,” is not a satisfactory response for that man. But that is essentially the response Mr Obama gave to America tonight. It was the only response he could give.

The Economist’s writer (un-bylined, as is the magazine’s tradition) also mocked the American media’s obsession with style, noting, “The lack of profanity from Mr Obama is troubling. It’s as if he doesn’t care.”

Marc Ambinder (center, The Atlantic magazine)

Whether he’s taken command of the response is immaterial now; it is now his spill to fix. Obama ran for office on the promise of restoring Americans’ faith in their government’s ability to solve modern problems. The economy aside, this is the biggest test of whether he can bend the curve of history in that direction.

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