Head to Head: YPNation's Live Coverage of Obama's Address to the Nation

There's one other thing that I feel compelled to point out for those of you that don't have much experience in Washington -- the tired and transparent strategy that each party uses to communicate their weak message to the American people.

The thing that makes me the most upset about this strategy is that each party expects you to be too stupid to realize that there are a set of agreed upon talking points that everyone is supposed to stick to in the case of an event like this one.

For example, one of the things that I found curious about last night's event was the point that both Stephen Hayes and Charles Krauthammer hit following the speech -- that the President didn't provide a framework for U.S. global leadership. I immediately suspected a talking point, which was later confirmed by Monica Crowley that repeated nearly the same point on the O'Reilly factor minutes later.

This evening, I pulled up the Wall Street Journal and found that Karl Rove (the architect) was making the same exact point in his column entitled: "Obama's Come Home Speech," which was a predictably terrible piece that ignored any number of programs and initiatives that the current administration is pursuing to protect the nation from attack (something that didn't happen during his boss's tenure).

Getting back to my original point, it is important to recognize that the idea that the President's speech should have been about American global leadership was prepared by a bunch of politicos that know zero about foreign and defense policy. I'll go out on a limb and say that this particular talking point was probably prepared a week or more in advance after a careful consultation with a poll group, a bunch of self-interested donors, and a team of political consultants that view winning elections as a far more important consideration in their lives than the safety and security of the American people (stability isn't good for business now is it?). Trust me on this one, I used to work with people like that.

As I pointed out last night, this was not a speech for that. Our transition with respect to Iraq has nothing to do with how the United States is going to address challenges such as China, Russia, India, Iran, Europe, and Latin American (not to mention Afghanistan) -- all of which is required material for such a speech. I don't know about you, but 20 minutes or so was enough for me last night.

Nor was this the proper forum to talk about our broken economy. As I also pointed out last night, is "closure" on Iraq really going to make our economy better? How much money have we spent already? Will another few hundred billion or even a trillion dollars change our current miserable trajectory?

The lesson here is to see through these poorly scripted performances. Whether it was portions of the President's speech, or Stephen Hayes and Karl Rove making a political point with no analytical basis, don't allow yourself to become the useful idiot that these people expect you to be. We are all better than that, and we should demand the same level of competence (and respect) from the political class.