Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I won't do any kind of lengthy analysis of the State of the Union speech here -- there's plenty of that, all over the Web. I will note that President Bush continues to be a very effective orator. While he doesn't have the inate speechmaking ability that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had, GWB has done the next best thing: he's assembled a team of speechwriters who are better at matching rhetoric to their man's speech patterns and syntactic qualities than any in recent memory. And Bush has one strength, the lack of which dogged Clinton in virtually all of his major speeches: he doesn't go on nearly as long. I'm one who remembers Clinton's speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, in which he droned on for something like three days. Brevity was never Clinton's strong point.