PRESIDENT CLINTON gave his final State of the Union address last week. 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. 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. But rhetorical style (not to mention speechwriter vanity) demanded something else entirely. 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.
How to resolve these competing 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.
President Clinton has found a way out of this difficulty; he finds a way out of every difficulty. 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. Gone is any pretense of a unifying theme. For the last seven years he has offered up speeches that defy every convention of the speechmaker’s art. They are astonishingly long, 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. This isn’t laziness on the president’s part, or a refusal to submit to discipline. This is what works. Many of the dignitaries on the floor of the House of Representatives might look dutiful or even bored. But the president doesn’t mind. The speeches are hugely successful. The laundry list, it turns out, is perfectly suited for conveying the essence of Clintonism.
This year’s speech, though longer than its predecessors, was faithful to the form as the president has established it. 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. In between came the great flopping body of the speech, an 80-minute-long inventory of programs and initiatives. Very few of these programs and initiatives are related to one another, and no great effort is made to establish a connection. They simply come pouring out from the president, bit following bit, delivered in his most emphatic style.
Normally this would be considered rhetorical suicide. But one of the president’s great insights has been to understand that nobody really listens to a State of the Union speech. Viewers let it hum in the background as they balance their checkbooks or put the kids to bed or wash the dishes. 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. And this makes them happy. No initiative emerges from the Clinton White House without having been polled and submitted to the approval of focus groups. That a policy will be popular with someone is guaranteed; the trick is to ensure that all the viewers will find something just for them.
And they do! They always do! The president has mastered the art of politics in an age of contentment, when most people see little use or need for politics. He knows that human beings are never perfectly content. 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. The president’s skill in this regard is almost supernatural. 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).
Each problem gets its own initiative; each initiative gets its own sentence, and sometimes two, in the State of the Union address. Is Grandma camped out in the spare bedroom? The president will triple the tax credit for “long-term care.” Are you worried, as a woman, that your salary is too low? The president offers the Pay-check Fairness Act so you can sue. Don’t get a 401(k) at work? Have a Retirement Savings Account, in which the president will match your contribution dollar for dollar, just like a real boss should. Are you having trouble sending your kid to college? You shouldn’t have to tighten your belt — use a tax credit instead. The president is concerned that your house is too far from your office; all that driving might make you sleepy! So he has 220,000 new housing vouchers to help you “live closer to the workplace.” Child care, violent TV shows, prescription drugs, your car’s low gas mileage — America, the president is on the case. He knows your concerns, and he has nationalized them.
This policy bedlam reflects an even deeper insight of the president’s. Bill Clinton is a liberal who sought office when “interest-group liberalism” was presumed dead. 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. 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. People who think they’re underpaid could be an interest group (a really big one!). People with college kids could be an interest group. People with sick parents could be an interest group. 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.
Of course, some things get neglected when the president describes the state of the union in this way. Foreign policy, for example, took up fewer than four of the speech’s eighty-nine minutes. Toward the close he said, “Our final challenge is the most important: to pass a national security budget . . . ” 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.
And in speaking of the defense budget he took an odd detour. 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. She was the wife of Bill Cohen, the secretary of defense. “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. Thank you, Janet Cohen. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.”
Once again the president had taken this most traditional of presidential speeches in a new direction, one that would have occurred only to him. On the House floor, Bill Cohen looked neither dutiful nor bored. He looked worried.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
