Obama’s Pragmatism Is A Strength and His Weakness

James Joyner has a good round-up of liberal disappointment with Barack Obama’s oil-spill televised address last night and Jonathan Bernstein’s take seems measured and sensible to me. So does Ross Douthat’s since Ross points out, correctly, that the President couldn’t win, not least because he’s supposed to “take control” of a political problem that cannot be solved politically and, in any case, is not the President’s to control in any practical sense. As Ross summarises matters:

[O]f course everybody saw through these rhetorical maneuvers, and nobody was satisfied. The speech was attacked from the right because it talked too much about green energy (see Clive Crook, for instance, and Jonah Goldberg and Byron York) instead of explaining how we’re going to plug the leak, and it was attacked from the left because it didn’t talk nearly enough about green energy and kicking our addiction to oil (see James Fallows and Ezra Klein and the talking heads on MSNBC, among many others).