The New Straight Talk
I don't know how many dozen conventional State of the Union speeches it took before I made my basic discovery about the applause that everyone monitors so earnestly during these annual events, reaching conclusions as to party reaction, committee chairman's attitude, chances of passage and so forth. It was that this applause in fact had practically nothing to do with any such considerations, but was a function of something else: The members rose and roared, disrupted the speech with prolonged applause and otherwise loudly indicated their approval precisely and almost exclusively for those pronouncements that they knew to be untrue.</br></br>Indeed, the more patently untrue, the lustier and more protracted the cheer. The fundamental proposition was always the same: that we could have it all - a stronger defense and more investment in domestic programs, environmental purity and accelerated energy development, lower taxes and increased benefits, etc. We will do this, but not at the expense of that ... the speaker would intone, his voice rising to indicate deep conviction for the wholly implausible second part of the sentence. And the place would go nuts.</br></br>You do not have to buy all of Bill Clinton's program or to check your view that there was too much of some things, not enough of others, to acknowledge that his Feb. 17 address for the most part crashed through this tradition of mutual dissembling between presidential speaker and congressional audience. Yes, there were some muzzy, unpersuasive moments. But in the main Clinton was saying not that we could have it all, but that we couldn't and that we now had to choose how to get out of the economic predicament that had been talked about mostly by indirection or even covertly in Washington for years.</br></br>Over those years, the dialogue on the question of the budget deficit and its effect had become ever more tortured, demeaning and involuted - embarrassingly so, I would have thought, for grown men and women. We at The Washington Post, starting back in the early Reagan years, would occasionally be visited ("off the record") by prominent Republican legislators and others urging us editorially to help bring about some bipartisan deal wherein big shots of both parties would just sort of close their eyes, hold hands and jump off the cliff together, always with careful provisions to keep one of the parties from cheating and being left standing there on the ledge while the other - poor fool - plummeted into the political abyss. They would talk about ways to frame the thing so that Reagan more or less wouldn't notice or at least wouldn't have the wit to object. They discussed him as if he were the mad uncle in the attic who, unfortunately, still had title to the house.</br></br>It was unbelievable, now that I think of it, but at the time it seemed only mildly strange. That is because Washington had pretty thoroughly bought into the proposition that some of the things Bill Clinton was to say the other night simply could not be said, not even argued about - too dangerous. People outside this city who complain about the waste of taxpayers' money should, if they want to get even madder, merely contemplate how much they paid out in both executive and legislative branch salaries over the decades to people who gave over hours and days and weeks of paid time to fussing about who would or wouldn't get the blame for saying aloud what they were all whispering among themselves.