IN AN hour of speech two things stood out and neither had anything to do with politics. Barack Obama’s state-of-the-union speech on January 28th was largely a cut-and-paste job from his previous reports to Congress, a series of bullet-points that never joined together to form a picture. The president seemed rather bouncy, but his audience only became animated when he got to the subject of hoped-for triumphs at the winter Olympics, at which point chants of “USA!” filled the chamber.The second moment came right at the end of the speech, when Mr Obama praised Cory Remsburg, an army ranger wounded in Afghanistan by a roadside bomb, which threw him face down into a ditch and planted shrapnel in his brain. Mr Remsburg, who was watching the speech from his seat next to the First Lady, stood to acknowledge the applause and waved, a gesture that made much of what had gone before seem trivial.Given that he often seems at his most comfortable in front of a large crowd, the president’s reticence requires some explaining. The state of the union has sometimes contained memorable phrases—Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “four freedoms”, George W. Bush’s “axis of evil”—but more often it...
from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1b8B5AF
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