WHEN United States President Bill Clinton delivered his 1996 State of the Union speech yesterday, prime-time television went into suspended animation. Each of the four networks, public TV channels, CNN and a handful of other cable stations carried the event live. This was not an administration attempt at cultural engineering for the politically-challenged, who would otherwise have been watching reruns of Roseanne.
Rather, it was merely a continuation of a long-standing tradition which says that no matter how much some Americans might hate their chief executive, and no matter how disillusioned they are with the Washington way, the State of the Union speech is one night of the year when the states are once again united, when every American comes together to pay at least a little lip service to the sacred notion of respect for the president.
In return, Mr Clinton paid his people back by sparing their yawns. Last year, he spoke for a soporific 80 minutes; this week he cut his oratory back to one hour.
In a sense, his fourth State of the Union speech was like his previous ones: long on rhetoric and stirring imagery, short on substance. But by virtue of its timing, it was remarkable in one respect - the president delivered his first speech of the 1996 election campaign.
It was reported that the Clinton inner-circle spent more sweat and tears on this speech than any of his previous three addresses, and the results were clear.
After three years in which a dynamically-minded president's greatest enemy has been his policy vacillations, a new version was unveiled: a statesmanlike president, determined at all costs to rise above the partisan ideology of Congress and unite America with the strength of his moral vision.
