Bill Clinton's Last Gasp

...So important is it, indeed, that the president devoted an entire sentence to it—only three fewer than the four sentences he devoted to suburban sprawl...

...Thank you...

...How to resolve these competing 'f demands—of the laundry list, on | one hand, and of rhetorical unity, on the other—was a difficulty that bedeviled countless speechwriters, slaving away their January nights to write the annual address...

...each initiative gets its own sentence, and sometimes two, in the State of the Union address...

...Have a Retirement Savings Account, in which the president will match your contribution dollar for dollar, just like a real boss should...

...She was the wife of Bill Cohen, the secretary of defense...

...But the president doesn't mind...

...radically discontinuous in structure, lacking transitions or any other kind of connective tissue, sprawling this way and that—every year it is a jumble, an eruption, a mess...

...And in speaking of the defense budget he took an odd detour...

...President Clinton has found a ¦ way out of this difficulty...

...Toward the close he said, "Our final challenge is the most important: to pass a national security budget...

...Are you worried, as a woman, that your salary is too low...

...I appreciate it...

...And they do...

...Once again the president had taken this most traditional of presidential speeches in a new direction, one that would have occurred only to him...

...In general, the president's method is to resolve uncomfortable choices by ignoring them altogether, and this he has done with the traditional dilemma presented by the State of the Union...

...This year's speech, though longer than its predecessors, was faithful to the form as the president has established it...

...Many of the dignitaries on the floor of the House of Representatives might look dutiful or even bored...

...They always do...

...People who think they're underpaid could be an interest group (a really big one...

...Child care, violent TV shows, prescription drugs, your car's low gas mileage—America, the president is on the case...

...They are astonishingly long, Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Custom required the president to give a State of the Union address that surveyed, in a sort of "laundry list," the nearly infinite tasks the federal government undertakes each year...

...Normally this would be considered rhetorical suicide...

...all that driving might make you sleepy...

...And this makes them happy...

...That a policy will be popular with someone is guaranteed...

...People with sick parents could be an interest group...

...You shouldn't have to tighten your belt—use a tax credit instead...

...They simply come pouring out from the president, bit following bit, delivered in his most emphatic style...

...Foreign policy, for example, took up fewer than four of the speech's eighty-nine minutes...

...The president is concerned that your house is too far from your office...

...Of course, some things get neglected when the president describes the state of the union in this way...

...the trick is to ensure that all the viewers will find something just for them...

...For the last seven years he has offered up speeches that defy every convention of the speechmak-er's art...

...People who dislike strip malls—people who hate traffic jams— people who want to live closer to their offices—all, all could be divided into interest groups, if only the government would address them as such...

...The laundry list, it turns out, is perfectly suited for conveying the essence of Clintonism...

...Gone is any pretense of a unifying theme...

...Watching it and then reading it, one couldn't help but recall that many, many years ago, in the dimly remembered recesses of time that historians call the pre-Clinton era, presidential speechwriters faced an annual dilemma...

...Don't get a 401(k) at work...

...Are you having trouble sending your kid to college...

...The best chance a politician has of seeming consequential, therefore, is to scan the electorate, isolate the tiny grievances and niggling wants that bedevil it, make the problems seem urgent by the heat of his rhetoric, and then express his intention to make everyone whole...

...it began with a few minutes devoted to the country's sterling condition, with the sly implication that the president himself is responsible for the happy news, and it closed on a brief note of Reaganite poetry, with mountaintops and rising suns and frontiers of endless possibility and so on...

...Is Grandma camped out in the spare bedroom...

...But rhetorical style (not to mention speechwriter vanity) demanded something else entirely...

...He knows your concerns, and he has nationalized them...

...The policies and programs wash over them like mood music . . . and they half-hear . . . something about the White House Office of One America . . . hummmm . . . and the GEAR UP program to mentor youth . . . and then the Individual Development Accounts . . . until . . . inevitably . . . they hear the president announce a program tailored for them...

...This policy bedlam reflects an even deeper insight of the president's...

...Viewers let it hum in the background as they balance their checkbooks or put the kids to bed or wash the dishes...

...Thank you, Janet Cohen...

...A presidential speech, in the view of presidential speechwriters, should be interesting: brief, if possible, but coherent in any case, all of a piece, its various elements interlocked, united in a single theme...

...It explains those otherwise puzzling polls, which show that a large majority of Americans consider Bill Clinton to be at once thoroughly untrustworthy and marvelously empathetic ("cares about people like you," as the pollsters put it...

...The speeches are hugely successful...

...The groups that it traditionally fed upon—labor unions, the racially or ethnically self-conscious, the legally disenfranchised— were either shrinking or losing their luster...

...Thank you...

...No initiative emerges from the Clinton White House without having been polled and submitted to the approval of focus groups...

...But one of the president's great insights has been to understand that nobody really listens to a State of the Union speech...

...Each problem gets its own initiative...

...Very few of these programs and initiatives are related to one another, and no great effort is made to establish a connection...

...This is what works...

...So he has 220,000 new housing vouchers to help you "live closer to the workplace...

...he finds I a way out of every difficulty...

...Peering up into the gallery, eyes glistening, his jaw working diligently, the president singled out a quite beautiful woman in a camera-friendly red dress...

...I want to thank Janet," the president said, "who more than any other American citizen has tirelessly traveled this world to show support for our troops...

...In between came the great flopping body of the speech, an 80-minute-long inventory of programs and initiatives...

...But the president understood that everyone could be an interest group, including those people, most of them in the otherwise contented middle-class, who never thought of themselves as belonging to one...

...The president's skill in this regard is almost supernatural...

...The president has mastered the art of politics in an age of contentment, when most people see little use or need for politics...

...The president will triple the tax credit for "long-term care...

...He knows that human beings are never perfectly content...

...People with college kids could be an interest group...

...The president offers the Paycheck Fairness Act so you can sue...

...This isn't laziness on the president's part, or a refusal to submit to discipline...

...He looked worried...

...Bill Clinton is a liberal who sought office when "interest-group liberalism" was presumed dead...

...On the House floor, Bill Cohen looked neither dutiful nor bored...