Presidential speech has a familiar ring

President Obama's speech last night seemed presidential in an ordinary sort of way. He had the Oval Office backdrop (unusual for him), the prime-time slot and the campaign-style analysis, cheer leading and goal-setting. I thought it was a good speech but not a great speech — typical, ordinary.

Some analysts have panned it altogether. Substance? Not a whole lot. Surprises? Not really. We all knew that Obama would come down hard on BP, but no one expected him to announce a resolution to the problem of spewing oil. We all expected he would try to turn this episode to his political advantage (he is a politician, after all). And the moralizing over America's thirst for foreign oil should have been no surprise from this president. He's right that our hunger for energy, especially overweight vehicles to haul our overweight bodies, vehicles with an abundance off excess hip room for our abundantly excess hips, is a big part of the energy problem. But his vague references to new jobs in the "green economy" were not especially convincing. Sure, we're offering incentives for these alternative-energy jobs, but we've still shed far more jobs than we've created these past two years. And of course, we're going to do everything we can to restore the Gulf Coast, but exactly how are we going to do that?

At least one observer has noted an uncomfortable resemblance to President Carter's famed "malaise" speech — one he preferred to call "Crisis of Confidence" (he never actually used the term "malaise" in the speech). Carter's 1979 speech made many of the same points that Obama made last night — we're buying too much foreign oil, and this has to stop. Carter swore that America would cap its thirst for foreign oil. By executive order, he was going to limit oil imports at 1978 levels, and he was going to find new energy sources. America would conquer this crisis through ingenuity.

Carter's solemnly presented promises about oil imports have never been met. Carter didn't survive the next 18 months in office, and his successor had a much more loving attitude toward fossil fuels. A Washington Post columnist suggests that the BP oil spill could become Obama's Iranian Hostage Crisis, and his oil spill speech could be Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" speech. The parallels in the two speeches' main themes are eerily similar, though separated by 31 years.

What Obama delivered was not a bad speech, but it was a speech that gave some people an eerie feeling that they'd heard it all somewhere before.