Barack Obama is only giving speeches

During the campaign — both primary season and the general election — there were pretty strenuous efforts on the parts of Barack Obama’s opponents to suggest that he was more or less a mirage. He gave a nice speech against the war, Hillary Clinton said, but what’s he actually done? He gave a well-regarded speech to Germans, the McCain campaign said, but where’s the substance? Some of this was fair — Obama really didn’t have a lengthy tenure of federal service to point to — but some of it was overblown: You don’t get to be president until you’re president.

Now Obama’s president. And he’s been doing things — or, to be realistic about it, undoing things done by the Bush Administration. Last week he ordered the closure of Gitmo. He ordered an end to torture by the U.S. government. Today, he’s ordering regulators to let states take action against climate change.

And yet, in Bill Kristol’s last column, we get this:

We don’t really know how Barack Obama will govern. What we have so far, mainly, is an Inaugural Address, and it suggests that he may have learned more from Reagan than he has sometimes let on. Obama’s speech was unabashedly pro-American and implicitly conservative.

We’re a week into a presidency that’s already seen some pretty dramatic course reversals — to repeat, on national security and climate issues — from the Bush Administration, and yet conservatives are still peddling the “he’s only given a speech” line. One gets the sense that in four years they’ll be saying something like, “Sure he gave a pretty speech about how the U.S. captured Osama bin Laden, but we’re still trying to figure out what he’s actually done.” There are plenty of conservative reasons for conservatives to criticize the president — not that I agree with them — but that he’s “all talk” really isn’t one of them.