21 January 2004

I watched the State of the Union Address last night,, my job as a concerned voter. I was still a little agitated from the afternoon and remarkably alert considering the hour. I watched the Dan Rather filter on the address, but even CBS had a hard time spinning the message, since it was all the President's show and his commentary did not mean a whit until it was over, and they got their medium back.

The timing was driven by the Iowa Caucus on Monday.The President was using the bully pulpit to trump the buzz coming out of the heartland, where thirty-thousand Hawkeye voters were setting the political agenda for his eventual opponent.

The results of the Caucus had been interesting, but the Address last night would put it on the back burner for a couple cycles. John Kerry, looking quite a bit like Edmund Muskey, had a surprising win. John Edwards, Clinton Light, was a strong second and Howard Dean had wilted to a soft third. For all his fierce rhetoric, he seems to have been a hot-house media flower.

As the President was announced and the cameras panned around the Chamber, I realized that this august assembly represented the zenith of my former career. I had met a lot of these people, or at least viewed them at close hand on their own ground.

Now that I am retired, I will not be hanging around the outer offices of greatness. My contacts will fade as surely and predictably as Howard Dean's candidacy. So I took a moment to marvel at it.

Some of the great might remember me, though most would not. I think the majority would deny ever having met me, if it was put to them as a question. Like the White House Staffer I saw in the canned-goods section of the military commissary at Fort Myer. He asked me to leave a White House meeting one time, and I got even by helping to connect him with his opposite number on the Prime Minister's staff in London. Sometimes doing the right thing is its own reward.

It took me two aisles to remember his name, which I knew would have irritated him if he took the time to think about it. We were cordial in the check-out lane. Contact is Washington is often just about being here, hardly an achievement.

I thought that as the Cabinet Secretaries filed in, in order of the precedence of their Departments. I worked personally for one, who still owes me the pictures of my retirement ceremony. He was proceeded by State, who knew me well enough to greet me in the Pentagon, and Interior, who I had occasion to talk to privately in a very strange place. I found her to be intelligent and very attractive, an unusual combination to find in a Cabinet officer. At least for me.

Next in line were Energy, then Education and Veterans affairs. One was brusque, a second relied on me briefly and the third I think I left a bit bemused. It doesn't matter which.

I think I might bat around .333 for recognition at a cabinet meeting- this one- which is not a bad average in baseball. Not that any of them would remember my name. Success is most often measured in making someone else's name memorable, for good or for ill. In my case, recognition would be more like: "Huh. Oh, yeah..."

Like the Vice President, who used those very words to me the last time we met. He had been reminded that I spend two months briefing him on the Air War in the Gulf in 1991. There was a vague awareness in his pale blue eyes. His words were for the ages. "Oh, yeah…."

Meeting the renowned of Washington can be like a Plains Indian counting coup on his foe. There are those that do it for the rush, attracted to the power. The many public disclosures of intensely private matters stems from that phenomenon. I found, over time, interaction with the famous or their gate- keepers was exhausting.

I was selling a new submarine project one year, a big- ticket item, and we briefed the Congress on the marvelous qualities of our warship and the efficacious impact on the industrial base. We had a methodical schedule that covered every Member and key staffer we could pin down to listen.

I could see some of them on the screen. Some are running or have stopped running for the Presidency. I was comforted to find, some years later, that the submarine we marketed was quite a nice one. Sometimes things work out for the good here.

The camera panned the great chamber, giving us vignettes of their reaction. The senior Senator from Massachusetts scowled in disagreement as the President beamed. I was standing outside the Russell Building when he was scooped up by a mini-van identical to the one I owned at the time. Last summer the arrival of his dogs at my office building briefly inconvenienced a small crowd of us. It didn't matter. It was all government time. It looks like he has lost some weight.

I knew none of the poster-people invited to represent their constituencies, the President of the Iraqi Governing Council, the soldiers or the elderly. The Chairman of the Armed Services Committee looked leonine and wise as he sat in the crowd, just as he did in his wood-paneled office. That is his job.

The Senior Senator from a Western state had panty-line issues when I found myself following her toward the underground tram to the Capitol. The junior Senator from New York looked tired and out of sorts, not at all as vivacious as when I saw her working a crowd at Kirkland Air Force Base. I was trying to get a future Ambassador to the UN back out of her orbit and onto his itinerary.

She would not know me from Adam, any more than her husband would though he used to play golf for free at our club.

The Joint Chiefs were right own front. Sitting in my little apartment, I watched them look to the Chairman for his guidance on when to stand up and applaud the Chief Executive. I had an intense chat with one of them on the issue of fun in the military. Not Gays, just why things weren't as much fun and adventurous as they used to be. The Chief sighed and said fun was something he could not put on his agenda.

The State of the Union is about spectacle and the assertion of leadership by the President. He did it and got the Democrat Candidates off center stage for a minute. For what it is worth, I thought it was technically a pretty good speech. I heard mostly about the war and a little about domestic policy.

I had not focused on the threat of steroids to our schoolchildren, though I have been suspicious of the size of the football players at my son's arch-rival High School for some time.

If I had turned off the tube and not let the commentators tell me what I thought, I would have gone to bed thinking it was one of the best the President had ever given. He has worked on minimizing the smirk, and he looked suitably Presidential.

The Democrats had the last word. It is only fair. I knew the House leader vaguely, since I used to have contacts on her Permanent Select Committee. She looked great, and said the President was reckless and a radical. She seemed to be in favor of international coalitions. She stumbled over some of her words, as if she had not practiced her pre-drafted speech as thoroughly as the President. I don't think she had the luxury of clearing her calendar.

The Minority Leader of the Senate talked about talking to his constituents back in the heartland. "What about us?" he said they told him. "We care about all that stuff overseas, but what about us?"

I turned off the tube before Dan Rather could frame all the issues for me. There would be plenty of time for that in the morning. But I thought as the screen went black that there were fewer people in the Senator's home state than there were in the District of Columbia. They don't even get a voting member of the House.

Not that I want them to. Two more Senators and a Congressman with a real vote would upset the delicate balance of power. It is curious, but it is just the way things are.

Copyright Vic Socotra