Clinton: He Leaves The Script Behind
WASHINGTON - It was a defining moment, of course, as all speeches seem to be these days. But President Clinton's defining moment was an hour - the longest State of the Union address in at least 12 years.
It proved once and for all there is no place that doesn't feel like a front porch to him. No speech is too important to improvise.
Put Bill Clinton in front of a joint session of the United States Congress, with millions watching. Tell him he needs to sell the plan that will make or break his presidency.
He'll jawbone as happily and as devil-may-care as a teenager talking trash with his best buddy. He's back! The Clinton of the campaign trail, blending detailed policy analysis with a lovable long-windedness, mixing statistics and southernisms like Gomer Pyle at MIT.
For a month there, Clinton gave reason to believe that the presidency might change his speaking style. Legendary as the blowhard of the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Clinton stunned the experts by turning in a concise and pithy Inaugural Address. He did it again on Monday, in his first televised speech from the Oval Office. That was a brief series of fine, short sentences.
A SINEWY SPEECH
Just before Clinton took to the podium last night, his aides circulated the text of a rather sinewy speech, titled "Address to Joint Session of Congress by President William Clinton."
But the president stuck to this prepared text for a total of four words. From then on, he was riffing. Ultimately, he followed his script roughly the way Jimi Hendrix used to follow the score of the national anthem.
The end result struck different listeners in different ways. It struck the same listeners in different ways. Some of his work was inspired. He'd take a rather blah sentence in his prepared speech, say: "We'll use the Superfund to clean up pollution, not just increase lawyers' incomes."
On the wing, Clinton improved it: "I'd like to use that Superfund to clean up pollution for a change, and not just pay lawyers."
`BACK TO WORK!'
Here's another. The text said: "And there is no recovery worth its salt that does not begin with new jobs." Clinton said: "And there's no recovery worth its salt that doesn't put the American people back to work!"
Much punchier.
But sometime the improvising just seemed too much. Clinton took a nifty little paragraph on summer jobs for kids and turned it into three paragraphs, without adding anything of substance. He sure knows a lot of words; he spoke, from the top of his head, about a "uniform, simplified, sensible, streamlined worker training program."
And numbers, too. There were so many statistics in an extemporaneous discourse on health care that a listener could do nothing but lay back on the tide and hope for the shore. "In 1992, we spent 14 percent of our income on health care, more than 30 percent than any other country in the world," he intoned. ". . . Unless we change the present pattern, 50 percent of the growth in the deficit between now and the year 2000 will be in health care costs. By the year 2000, almost 20 percent. . . ."
By the end, he had added more than enough words to bury Ronald Reagan's record for the longest State of the Union speech of recent years. Reagan spoke 5,600 words in 1983; Clinton pushed a good 1,000 words past that.