Simple Minds
Don't worry if you missed the President's State of the Union Address, because we're wrapping it up right here.
 Normally, I'd be giving you a news summary for the morning, but the speech Bush gave yesterday is pushing everything else off the boards. As you'd expect, there's plenty of commentary on "What He Said," and "What He Really Said," and "What He Didn't Say," but we're not going there. That's because we're adaptive animals, we look for threats first, and so the larger question is, "What the hell was in that speech that could hurt me or my family?"
The short answer: Nothing. The SOTU address is, of course, a policy statement with some marketing angles. If you read between the lines, you get some idea of what the administration thinks about you, and what it thinks about everything else. Let's look at those ideas in turn.
What the White House thinks about you: You are simple. Parsing the speech reveals that in his 5,366-word speech, the average sentence was 18 words in length. Some might make the case that perhaps Bush isn't good with long sentences, and we'll admit the possibility. So you and the President are very simple people with limited attention spans. Here's an example of Bush on the dividend tax cut:
- We should also strengthen the economy by treating investors equally in our tax laws. It's fair to tax a company's profits. It is not fair to again tax the shareholder on the same profits.
This is a highly complex issue reduced to terms of "fairness" that a 3-year-old could follow. Short, punchy sound-bites. I thought I'd check a Tony Blair speech to see if the British are smarter than we are. Yep. Average sentence length in a speech of equivalent size: 26 words. For example:
- As I said information is power and any government's attitude about sharing information with the people actually says a great deal about how it views power itself and how it views the relationship between itself and the people who elected it. I want to say two things about this, one of which is very obvious, and one of which is less obvious.
That's quite a remarkable difference. To continue, Bush's SOTU address breaks down as follows:
- Part 1 — Introduction
- Part 2 — Economy
- Part 3 — Health care
- Part 4 — Energy
- Part 5 — Compassion
- Part 6 — Security
- Part 7 — Outlaw regimes
- Part 8 — Iraq
- Part 9 — Closing
We can toss out the opener and closer sections as they're just boilerplate. That leaves seven items, exactly the number that people can hold in mind at one time. Again, they think that you are such a simpleton. Insulting, really.
By the numbers, common words we'd expect to find in the speech appear with the following frequency:
- We: 143
Our: 70
I: 33
You: 28
America, Americans, etc.: 57
War: 11
Economy, economic, etc.: 13
Saddam: 19
Tax: 8
Must: 18
Will: 49
But: 5
The Bush speechwriters avoid "but" in favor of "and," they like "employer" instead of "business," and they prefer "mom and dad" to "parent." You see this all through Bush's remarks. By topic, in order, his speech touched on the following issues:
- Tax relief, corporate accounting, recession, terrorist attacks, corporate scandals, stock market declines, unemployment, jobs, income tax, the marriage penalty, the child credit, dividend tax cut, the deficit, a balanced budget, Federal spending, Social Security, affordable health care, Medicare, prescription drug benefit, medical liability reform, energy independence, the environment, conservation, air pollution, a healthy forest initiative, fuel-cell technology, the homeless, single-parent families, drug addiction, prisoners, battered women, lonely seniors, faith-based initiatives, Citizen Service Act, USA Freedom Corps, mentor program, anti-drug education programs, addiction recovery programs, ban on partial-birth abortion, ban on human cloning, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Israel, Palestine, the hungry, AIDS in Africa, retroviral drugs, HIV/AIDS in America, AIDS Relief plan, AIDS relief for the Caribbean, international terrorism, Al Qaida, CIA assassinations of Al Qaida operatives, border and port security, TSA, biological attack preparedness, ICBM defense, bio-attack defense, intelligence analysis, a Terrorist Threat Integration Center, rogue regimes, Iraqi disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, WMDs, North Korea, Saddam Hussein, U.N. inspectors, inspections process, Iraqi arsenal (assumed), Iraqi compliance with inspections, British intelligence, Sept. 11 (lessons of), Iraqi regime change, war preparations, American faith in Providence.
There are probably a few things in there you didn't want to see, and you most likely feel that there are some glaring omissions. One does notice, at a glance, that the content is almost perfectly divided between domestic and foreign policy. Finally, let's look at what Bush and the White House can do about any of that. We'll go through the speech and excise anything that's simply rhetorical—remarks like, "now is a time for," and "we are a great people," etc. We'll toss out anything to do with "join me in," "I urge you to," "I am proposing that," "we must work together in," and so forth as being either polemic or a Congressional matter. Let's just focus on what Bush can do all by himself:
1. His budget commits "an additional $400 billion over the next decade to reform and strengthen Medicare."
2. He will "continue to seek peace between a secure Israel and a democratic Palestine."
3. His team is "working closely with other nations to prevent further attacks."
4. He is "instructing the leaders of the FBI, the CIA, the Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to develop a Terrorist Threat Integration Center."
5. Colin Powell will "ask the U.N. Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider the facts of Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world."
That's about it. Anything else is on a wish list or being extended to us as an F.Y.I. item. My primary concern with all of the above is that it's such a ham-handed attempt at a finesse. It is precisely the same kind of marketing and psychology massage you get every time you see a commercial. This isn't communication, it's manipulation, and I hate to be treated like that. I'll bet you don't like it much, either.
3:51:52 PM 
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Wednesday, January 29, 2003
