The trouble with giving a provocative speech:
Sometimes, it provokes people

President Bush wanted his second inaugural address to sound BOLD, darn it!

He kept telling his speechwriter Mike Gerson that he wanted this speech to be his "freedom speech." Gerson, who coincidentally had a mild heart attack shortly before writing the freedom speech, obliged.

For his last speech before leaving the speechwriting job to take a policy position, Gerson produced a 2,000-worder wherein the words freedom and liberty appeared about 50 times. That means, 2.5% of the words Bush spoke were either "freedom" or "liberty." And the other 97.5% of the words was filler.

It was a great speech. For a barroom.

A few minutes after the speech ended用erhaps eager to sound like a balanced pundit悠 posted this winning analysis: "None of us will know how good this speech was until we see how it sounds four years from now." That sentence might have been more accurate had I said, "four hours from now." More to the point, my analysis might have been more accurate if I had simply waited four hours to weigh in with my terribly important opinion.

Now the president and his aides and his flunkies and his father have spent the last week taking back anything and everything in the speech that freaked out Republicans and Democrats alike.

And mostly Republicans. Even the usually reliable Republican shill Peggy Noonan scoffed at Bush's promise to make the entire world perfect. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, she said the speech "left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. ... To the extent our foreign policy is marked by a division that has been (crudely but serviceably) defined as a division between moralists and realists ... President Bush sided strongly with the moralists, which was not a surprise. But he did it in a way that left this Bush supporter yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance ... This world is not heaven. The president's speech seemed rather heavenish."

I think it's safe to say that when Peggy Noonan doesn't like your inaugural address and you're a Republican president, you screwed up.

Coming out of this inaugural fiasco are two big lessons: One, that's applicable to all speechwriters and another, that applies only to outgoing White House scribes with heart conditions.

All speechwriters: When the speaker wants you to make him sound bold, you'd better ask him if he's ready to back up your strong words. In short, you can't fake bold.

White House scribes: When you're weak from a heart attack and you're on your way out of the job anyway, maybe the new guy should write the second inaugural. He's the one who has to live with it for the next four years.