Tonight President Obama will give his third State of the Union address. I suspect I am not alone in wishing it could be tweeted.
If it’s what I dread it will be, it will be yet another annual shopping list, an hour-long catalogue of items, many of which we’ll never hear about again, intended to please this or that constituency.
Everybody seems to be giving advice so I’ll give mine: brevity is the soul of wit. Or, as David Belasco put it “If you can’t put your idea on the back of your business card, you don’t have a clear idea.”
I echo your sentiments.
Separate topic, similar vein: 20 years ago a former partner at my firm noted – “if you can’t write down on a 3×5 card why you like the investment……..something is wrong.
Good lord, engineers at play.
Strip out the sales and marketing and easy user interface design and packaging and just say, “We’re making a computer with a lot of memory and a big hard drive. It will be putty colored because we have a lot of leftover putty paint. That is all.”
It’ll be a shopping list, it is always a shopping list. You’d have a more productive evening watching re-runs of I Love Lucy or even The Brady Bunch.
Doug at OTB linked to an analysis of SOTU over time for number of words and reading level. I would be happy if the SOTU were judged on amount of time, and the enjoyment level of eighth-graders.
PD:
As a man who works for those 8th graders (and 9th and 10th) what they would like is a speech with rock-hard abs and great hair. Also some violence.
Yessss!!!
I am being somewhat tongue-in-check, but the President I admire most would be thinking more practically about how to give a formal speech that meets all of the ceremonial expectations, while experiencing a life of its own as it is absorbed in different ways, at different times, by the People. That’s a pretty stiff order. What could the President say tonight that would have me discussing it at the coffee maker with my employees? My wife? My children?
Heh… if you’re signed up for the Barak Obama White House Twitter feed, the speech IS being published on Twitter.
I’m about to shut down TweetDeck because the updates every 5 seconds are driving me crazy.