President Obama’s address to the joint session and the country last night was a three-act drama.  The first third of the speech covered the economic mess, and was a well-constructed speech in itself.  Here, Obama addressed the short-term problems America faces.  The second act covered four initiatives:  energy, health care, education, and debt reduction.  These were the issues that President Obama identified as the most important long-term problems we must confront.  And the final third, the weakest section, covered the rest of the world and everything else. 

On the plus side, therefore, Obama took a good deal of my advice from yesterday, at least in the first two pieces of the speech.  If I were grading it, I’d give it a “B+.”  It was the best constructed State of the Union (or equivalent) message in recent memory.  On the negative side, the speech was still too long, and the journey through the three acts was not clear or strong enough to hold all his listeners enthralled for an hour. 

The first part of the speech was the best, and the best constructed.  Jumping right into the problem, Obama spoke of the parlous state of the economy:

You don’t need to hear another list of statistics to know that our economy is in crisis, because you live it every day.  It’s the worry you wake up with and the source of sleepless nights.  It’s the job you thought you’d retire from but now have lost; the business you built your dreams upon that’s now hanging by a thread; the college acceptance letter your child had to put back in the envelope.  The impact of this recession is real, and it is everywhere.

He then moved on to talk about the solution, re-establishing the flow of credit in the US banking system, in order to break the ‘destructive cycle’ of the credit freeze:

That is why this administration is moving swiftly and aggressively to break this destructive cycle, restore confidence, and re-start lending.

Third, we will act with the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times….

Finally, he called for action from the Congress to continue to solve our short-term economic problems:

So I ask this Congress to join me in doing whatever proves necessary.  Because we cannot consign our nation to an open-ended recession.  And to ensure that a crisis of this magnitude never happens again, I ask Congress to move quickly on legislation that will finally reform our outdated regulatory system.  It is time to put in place tough, new common-sense rules of the road so that our financial market rewards drive and innovation, and punishes short-cuts and abuse.

Had Obama ended his speech here, he would have made history with a short, well-constructed address on our current financial problems and how to work our way out of them.  But of course, he also had a larger long-term agenda to cover, and so he forged ahead to discuss his ‘blueprint for the future’.

The recovery plan and the financial stability plan are the immediate steps we’re taking to revive our economy in the short-term.  But the only way to fully restore America’s economic strength is to make the long-term investments that will lead to new jobs, new industries, and a renewed ability to compete with the rest of the world. The only way this century will be another American century is if we confront at last the price of our dependence on oil and the high cost of health care; the schools that aren’t preparing our children and the mountain of debt they stand to inherit.  That is our responsibility.

What followed was a list of the four topics, each one briefly developing the problem, and proposing a solution under the rubric of the budget Obama will soon present to the Congress.  For example, the President argued that we need to take action on energy because “to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.”

And he immediately proposed his solution:

So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.  And to support that innovation, we will invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.

This approach is much more like a traditional SOTU with their endless lists of problems and proposed legislative solutions.  President Obama’s innovation was to address only four big topics, and for that our attention spans commend him.

The final section of the speech was the weakest.  It contained a brief nod to the world beyond our borders.  It pledged to “end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them,” not that these two items have anything to do with one another.  It made the usual pledge to “root out the waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.” 

The speech then raced through Medicare, Social Security, honesty and accountability, tax breaks and increases, the two wars we’re fighting, our men and women in uniform, Guantanamo Bay, torture, negotiation, alliances, protectionism and the G-20, peace in Israel, and finally hope in the most unlikely places.  To illustrate that hope, he singled out the usual 3 heroes, a bank president, a school girl, and Greensburg, Kansas. 

In sum, a speech that began to tackle the limitations of the form of the SOTU, delivered well in the first two-thirds of the talk, and ended weakly in the third with the usual laundry list of issues, programs, and departments that the President’s team couldn’t bear to leave out.  Now we’ve got another reason to look forward to 2010: not only economic, but also continued rhetorical improvement, in this country. 

This blog is also posted on Harvard's site:  http://tinyurl.com/d2al77