I answered RicardoH’s question about my take on the speech with the following email reply:

We watch all of these things on CSPAN. We also turn off the TV after the event is over so that we do not listen to the phone calls that they take afterwards.

I don’t need no stinkin talkin heads to tell me what I just saw or what I thought about it.

We were very much pleased by the address. Emmie really should have watched. It sounds like she could have used the pick-me-up.

We were waiting for him to say, OK, Senate, the House is doing its jobs, so get off yer arse and get moving.

As I have been doing in several places, he explained the plan – We do deficit spending until the economy recovers and then we pay back what we borrowed and then some. This is a nice counter to all the naysayers who are complaining that our children and their children will be paying for this deficit for generations. He stated the positive case for the plan on his terms rather than countering the naysayers on their terms. Is this putting the right framing to the issue? Or, as I like to say, force the opposition to debate your issues rather than debating their issues.

I wonder if Martha Coakley noticed the difference.

He should have added that this paying back what we borrowed is exactly the action we must take to prevent the next bubble. So it has this additional virtue besides just paying our debts.

It was way into the speech and I kept waiting for it, but he did finally get to the point that health care reform (or whatever words he used) is part of deficit reduction, not part of the deficit problem. Another example of getting the debate onto his turf and away from the opponent’s turf.

I am not saying that this idea of refocusing the debate is my idea that somehow Obama has picked up on. In fact, just the opposite. I identified what it is that Obama does to make his rhetoric so effective, put it into words that I can understand, and have tried to adopt this approach whenever I have enough self-awareness to control my words.