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Obama’s speech was a strong energy bill pitch, necessary and resounding—a good use of the Rahm Emanuel theory that you should never let a crisis go to waste.

But he didn’t do what was needed: convey the sense that the CEO is back from offsite and now deeply, viscerally engaged in the messy process of management. The speech showcased what he has always shown us he is good at—articulating the overarching goal, and ramping up the rhetoric to meet it. But he cited too many names that have already lost our vote. Salazar, you’re doing a helluva job! Obama’s supposedly stellar Secretary of the Interior strikes the rest of us as doing a good impersonation of being all hat and no cattle—the guy who called himself the “sheriff” but put...