In 2000, I won a $40 newsroom pool at The Washington Times by making the best prediction of the length of Bill Clinton’s State of the Union Address. (Hint: With Clinton, always bet longer.)
For a decade, from the late Clinton era and continuing through the Bush years, my job on SOTU nights was to edit the transcript of the speech down to about a half-page of excerpts — 60 column inches, roughly 2,200 words — trying to capture the key points.
What unholy drudgery it was! White House speechwriters specialize in humorless tedium puffed up by historic ambition. Inevitably, the president begins with several paragraphs of soaring Churchillian oratory (challenge and mission and duty and so forth) strewn with warm anecdotes about what are called Skutniks — ordinary citizen whose stories symbolize the points the president wishes to emphasize. And then comes the Laundry List of specific policy proposals.
Clinton’s Laundry Lists were especially wretched because, once the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that any of what the president proposed would ever be enacted.
Rather than scale back his ambitions, however, this situation caused Clinton to become absurdly grandiose. He’d start rattling off his Laundry List, crammed with completely zany stuff: Tax credits for this and subsidies for that, and on and on until you half-expected him to conclude by guaranteeing that every 15-year-old boy in America would get to second base by the end of sophomore year.
Most of what Clinton actually did propose in the Laundry List portion of his later State of the Union address was micro-initiatives — small-potatoes policies and programs intended to appeal to one or another constituency group: Suburban soccer moms, senior citizens, farmers, etc. These were merely rhetorical gestures, intended to signify how much Clinton felt your pain. It didn’t really matter whether the proposals were enacted. Merely by proposing this stuff, Clinton showed he cared. And now we see Obama going the same dismal and dishonest route:
President Obama will propose in his State of the Union address a package of modest initiatives intended to help middle-class families, including tax credits for child care, caps on some student loan payments and a requirement that companies let workers save automatically for retirement . . .
Yadda, yadda, yadda. Small potatoes, the sure sign of an administration that has lost whatever momentum it had a year ago, when Hope and Change looked like an irresistible political tsunami. And some poor schmuck is going to be saddled with the job of editing that transcript tonight. Glad it’s not me.
