First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
— John Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961
I ask your support for bipartisan legislation to guarantee that a woman can stay in the hospital for 48 hours after a mastectomy.
— Bill Clinton, State of the Union Address, February 4, 1997
IF YOU WERE WATCHING PRESIDENT CLINTON’S State of the Union address last week and turned off the sound — always a temptation — you still would have gotten the gist, even in pantomime. The president ran through his entire repertoire of theatrical gestures: from the JFK finger jab to the Kirk Douglas jaw flex, from the genial Reagan head tilt to the Clint Eastwood eye squint. There was even, briefly, a revival of the old favorite, the Molly Ringwald lowerlip bite, but it was quickly superseded by the Lee Iacocca thumb thrust. Each gesture, in its place, was meant to convey the speech’s theme, which is that the president is a purposeful man of action and, furthermore, an active man of purpose.
For those who doubt it, there is the text of the speech itself. As any old pundit can tell you, the great technical problem inherent in a State of the Union speech is that it can disintegrate into a mere list of initiatives and accomplishments (a “laundry list,” in the mysterious lingo of the pundit), as each cabinet department and regulatory agency inserts a reference to its own pet program. The president’s speech last week did not overcome this difficulty. It bounced from toxic waste cleanup to AIDS research to United Nations dues to safety locks on guns to the vice president’s annual family conference. As it turned out, all this programmatic hyperactivity served him well, as a rhetorical matter. It gave the speech a specificity his disastrous inaugural address lacked. And it created the impression of a president who is doing everything all at once.
The premise of the speech was that we, as a nation, deserve no less. The president began with a paradox, the first of many to ensnare the speech, all of them unremarked and perhaps unrecognized by him. He ticked off the good news — four years of growth, crime down, welfare rolls down, lots of trade, Cold War over — and concluded, “the state of the union is strong.” The public servants assembled before him were delighted with this announcement and gave him a big cheer. Another president — a Coolidge or an Eisenhower — might have let matters rest there, dismissing the congressmen so everyone could go home and find out what happened to O. J.
But Coolidge and Ike were not purposeful men of action, on the model of our current president. Though the nation is strong, President Clinton will not rest. We face, he went on, “a challenge as great as any in our peacetime history.” Our peacetime history, of course, has included many daunting challenges: depressions, financial panics, dust bowls, urban riots, Jimmy Carter. The president’s challenge dwarfs them all. It is nothing less than a challenge to “rise to the decisive moment to make a nation and a world better than any we have known.”
The president was surely torn here between his famous immodesty and his equally famous ambition. On the one hand, there’s the state of the union, which he clearly regards as much better than any we have known, thanks to him; on the other hand, a man of action can’t just do nothing for the next four years. His solution: to make this nation better than any we have known, even though it already is. “We face no imminent threat,” he explained, “but we do have an enemy.” The godless Reds? The dreaded Hun? “The enemy of our time is inaction.” A sigh of relief: In truth, this isn’t much of an enemy. If the enemy were something else — say, action — we might have cause to worry. Action is mobile and alert and, so to speak, active. But inaction is nothing. Inaction just lies there. We can eat inaction’s lunch. We’re Americans.
And as Americans we now have a president who will take on inaction. He will do this by . . . taking action. Simplest thing in the world. “Tonight I issue a call to action,” he said, and in case anyone missed the point, the remarkable sentence that followed contained the word action seven times.
By now the president had been speaking for only three or four minutes, but with all the challenges and actions and calls and risings to decisive moments, his audience must have been exhausted. Sensing this, the president downshifted. He signaled his slower pace by starting a list. “First,” he said, “we must move quickly to complete the unfinished business of our country.” There are three pieces of unfinished business: “to balance the budget, renew our democracy, and finish the job of welfare reform.” By this rendering, the welfare reform part seemed particularly tricky, since apparently what was unfinished about it was that we had to finish it. Nobody said welfare reform was going to be easy.
Once again the president plunged into paradox. “Let this Congress,” the president said, “be the Congress that finally balances the budget.” And again the Congress rose as one to whoop and cheer. Then: “I will propose a detailed plan to balance the budget by 2002.” More cheers! But . . . wait a sec. By 2002, this Congress, the 105th, will be long gone. In 2002, it will be the 107th Congress that actually . . . “We need action,” the president said hurriedly. “We should balance the budget now, and then . . . we must agree to a bipartisan process to preserve Social Security.” Here, at last, is our first real taste of Clintonian action: Balance the budget now by assuming somebody else will balance it five years from now, and then — boldly, without fear of the consequences — agree to a process. No wonder all the congressmen were so happy.
This three-parter was only the first of the president’s many lists. He turned next to education, which proved to be the heart of his speech. “My number one priority,” he said, “is to insure that Americans have the best education in the world.” Okay: So it may not be his number one priority — he had just got done saying that “first we must move quickly to complete the unfinished business of our country,” which would suggest that the unfinished business is his number one priority. This is a call to action, not a logarithm. And as a call to action it is fugue-like in its complexity. The president’s education priority — call it number 1-A — is “the highest threshold to the future,” and it (the threshold, I’m pretty sure) has three goals, to wit: “Every 8-year-old must be able to read; every 12-year-old must be able to log on to the Internet; every 18-year-old must be able to go to college; and every adult must be able to keep on learning for a lifetime.”
Now, educationists will make two criticisms of the president’s three goals. First, they aren’t terribly ambitious. And second, there are four of them. But the more the better. For this threshold with the goals must support a plan that has principles — ten of them, in fact. You see what I mean about the complexity. Here the president has violated the first axiom of every speechwriter who makes a laundry list: Keep it short, and learn how to count. (Actually, that’s two axioms, but who’s counting?)
Even more dizzying, the ten principles aren’t principles. “First,” the president said, not for the first time, “a national crusade for education standards.” That’s not a principle, of course; it’s not even a sentence. And the confusion deepens. “Not federal government standards, but national standards.” Another paradox: The federal government, led by the president, ” develops national tests of student achievement,” but the standards are not the federal government’s, if you follow me. Moreover, “every state should adopt high national standards.” Yes, but if the state adopts them, they’re state standards, aren’t they? And what if each state adopts different high national standards? Then you’ve got a whole riot of national standards, which means that, as standards, they aren’t standard, technically. Can that be right? Too late: The president was suddenly advocating “world-class standards our children must meet.” Is this how they do things in Japan?
The president slogged through his ten principles. And sure enough, by the end, they weren’t principles anymore, they were “proposals.” Somewhere in the fourth proposal, he delivered the interesting, not to say alarming, news that he and the first lady were going to convene a “White House conference” on ” the brain.” Doubtless the conference will not be as ambitious as it sounds, and in this it is like the State of the Union address itself. After his ten education principles, the president’s rhetoric only intensified, even as, to judge by the camera shots, his audience’s interest flagged. He grew desperate: Twice he compared our present situation to the onset of the Cold War. Challenge piled upon challenge and imperative followed imperative: “We must move strongly . . .” “We must pursue . . .” “We must act . . .” His apparent urgency relied on the old rhetorical tool of the false choice. To take one example: He challenged every children’s hospital to connect to the Internet. ” A child in bed can stay in touch with school, family, and friends. A sick child need no longer be a child alone.” No, now he can be a sick child downloading nudie pictures of Teri Hatcher.
One wonders: Does the president truly believe that without his intercession, sick children will suffer alone? Maybe so. This delusion is kin to the greatest of Clintonian paradoxes. In the State of the Union, the president reaffirmed his belief in smaller government. But he believes in smaller government that does just about everything. Here is where the speech began to bounce around, and it continued to bounce from initiative to initiative all the way to the end, when he declared: “My fellow Americans, we have work to do.” We do, we do.
“Some may say that it is unusual for a president to pay this kind of attention to education,” he had said earlier. He did his Dudley Doright chin lift and went on: “Some may say that it is simply because the president and his wonderful wife have been obsessed with this subject for more years than they can recall.”
Who? Who says that? We will never know. Although the speech ground on for another half-hour, this was its most revealing moment, when the vanity that propels the president was most clearly exposed, There was pathos in it. The president aches for greatness; every “we must,” every “I challenge” testified to that longing. It is his misfortune, instead, to be an inconsequential man for a placid time. His words and tone are Kennedyesque; his proposals are fitted for a deputy county commissioner back in his native Hot Springs. How difficult it must be for him, then, to stand in the august chambers of Congress, the people’s representatives arrayed before him, with large and sonorous rhetoric unwinding from the TelePrompTer, and to realize — as surely he must, somehow — that he is all dressed up with nowhere to go.
Senior Editor Andrew Ferguson is the author of Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces.
