Since the pundits are still dissecting the State of the Union message, I’ll add my two cents’ worth.

President Bush’s vow to replace 75 percent of oil imports from the Middle East with alternative fuels by 2025 was greeted with a great deal of understandable skepticism. But I have yet to hear anyone ask the question, What percent of U.S. energy imports come from the Middle East?

What percent do you think, readers? Is it 50 percent? 70 percent?

Actually, it’s about 20 percent. Since the OPEC oil embargo of 30 years ago, the U.S. has wisely diversified its energy suppliers. Today, we import more oil from Canada than we do from Saudi Arabia.

When we add that piece of information to the equation, President Bush’s goal, while still very ambitious, appears much more realistic.

Even more so when you factor in the upward pressure on oil prices that will be exerted over the next quarter century by the growing economies of the developing world – especially China. As oil prices climb, alternative fuels will become more price-competitive.

I know that presidents have been promising to make the U.S. energy independent for years, but I’m willing to cut the president some slack on this issue. I think that market forces will work in his favor.

This week I will be speaking at the 2006 Speechwriter's Conference, presented by Lawrence Ragan Communications, Inc. My subject is the life and rhetoric of Robert Green Ingersoll, the "Great Agnostic."

To mark the occasion, I am reprinting an appreciation of Ingersoll I wrote that was first published in Speechwriter's Newsletter in July of 1999, on the hundreth anniversary of Ingersoll's death:

FORGOTTEN FIREBRAND

During one of his lecture tours of the United States, Oscar Wilde discovered that an American speaker was drawing bigger crowds and higher fees than he was. Piqued, the brilliant and loquacious Irishman – himself one of the most spellbinding talkers who ever lived – sat in on several of his rival’s lectures. He came away marveling. “Robert Ingersoll,” he opined, “is the most intelligent man in America.”

Wilde was not the only literary lion to be awed by Ingersoll’s eloquence. Mark Twain wrote of him: “Lord, what an organ is human speech when it is played by a master!” Walt Whitman (at whose grave, Ingersoll would deliver a eulogy of surpassing grace and tenderness) said that Ingersoll's oratory was “sweet, fluid – as they say in the Bible, like precious ointment.”

Nor were Ingersoll’s admirers limited to the world of letters. Great scientific minds like inventor Thomas Edison and naturalist Luther Burbank praised Ingersoll for the brilliance and clarity of his thought. Social activists, like Clarence Darrow and Eugene V. Debs, saw him as a friend of the common man. Still others – including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass – were grateful for his ardent support of votes for women and equal rights for African-Americans.

Ingersoll was a man well ahead of his time. Even today, when President Clinton is trying to coax the nation into a frank dialogue on race, it is unlikely that a white speaker would be as searingly honest in addressing a black audience as Ingersoll was in 1883: “It is very easy to see why colored people should hate us, but why we should hate them is beyond my comprehension. They never sold our wives. They never robbed our cradles. They never scarred our backs. They never pursued us with bloodhounds. They never branded our flesh.”

In another speech, he summed up his views on the equality of all persons in the ringing words: “I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.”

Who was this forgotten firebrand, Robert Ingersoll?

He was born in Dresden, New York in 1833, the son of a Congregationalist minister. Largely self-educated, he qualified for the bar and established a successful law practice in Illinois in 1858. When the Civil War broke out, he raised the 11th Illinois Cavalry Regiment and was awarded the rank of colonel. After leaving the army, he became a major figure in Republican Party politics. His nomination of Sen. James G. Blaine of Maine for the presidency at the Republican national convention in 1876 (the famous “Plumed Knight” speech) set the standard for American political rhetoric for years to come.

A distinguished veteran, a prominent lawyer, and arguably the greatest speaker of his day, Ingersoll might have been governor of Illinois or even president. But his path to power was barred by his own stubborn integrity; he wouldn’t moderate his opinions to win votes.

On top of being an early feminist and civil rights advocate, Ingersoll was an agnostic. An honest doubter, he respected honest faith. But he was merciless with cant, humbug, and bigotry. When a prominent freethinker named Charles B. Reynolds was arrested in New Jersey under that state’s archaic blasphemy law, Ingersoll was outraged. Defending Reynolds pro bono, he declared in his closing speech to the jury: “I deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips – to make the tongue a convict. I passionately deny the right of the Herod of authority to kill the children of the brain.”

Ingersoll lost the case, but had the last laugh on the New Jersey law. When he arranged, over the vigorous protests of local clergy, to give a lecture in Hoboken, ministers turned out with police detectives in tow, ready to arrest the Great Agnostic the minute he uttered a single heretical word. Undismayed, Ingersoll began his lecture by pointing out how certain passages of the Bible, if taken literally, contradicted each other. Did that mean the Bible was not in fact the Word of God? “I don’t know,” he answered with a bland smile. “I don’t know. If it were not for the Jersey blasphemy statute I might know. As it is, I don’t. The Hoboken parsons know. Ask them.” Even the police were guffawing by the time he finished.

Robert Ingersoll died a hundred years ago this month, on July 21, 1899. He is buried in Arlington Cemetery -- a fitting resting place for a champion of liberty.

I've just seen a news item to the effect that there are now over 27.2 web logs or blogs currently on the Internet. The number of blogs is reported to be doubling every five and a half months.

So if you are reading this, THANK YOU!!!

Peter Benchley, who died this week at 65, will be remembered as the author of Jaws. But he also served a brief stint as a speechwriter to President Lyndon Johnson during the late 1960s.

Peter was the grandson of the famous humorist Robert Benchley, and there was a moment in his White House career when his grandfather’s ghost must have flickered mischievously in the background.

A hapless Midwestern college student had written to then-White House press secretary, George Christian, to ask him about the speechwriting process in the Johnson administration.

“First of all,” the student inquired, “does President Johnson write his own speeches? If not, who does? What kind of background do his speechwriters have as far as education is concerned? Do these writers adhere to any specific style, such as the simple, clear-cut style which Aristotle advocates, or the grand, embellished style which Cicero seems to promote?”

Christian assigned the answering of this letter to Benchley, and Benchley obliged with the following reply:

“Here are the answers to your questions:

1. All the President’s speeches are written by elves.

2. The President never sees them before he delivers them.

3. The average education of the President’s writers is between fourth and fifth grade. One man finished high school. By cheating.

4. The President’s style can best be described as bombastic. He is a nut on length.”

Liz Carpenter, the former LBJ aide from whom I heard this story, ended by saying, “Fortunately, this reply was never sent.”

“Fortunately” is right. If LBJ had ever learned of the contents of this letter, Peter Benchley might never have lived to write anything else. There are politicians deadlier than even a great white shark.

The current issue of the New Yorker has an interesting article by Jeffrey Goldberg about Bush speechwriter, Michael Gerson. Unfortunately, the article is flawed by a cheap shot in which Mr. Goldberg calls Calvin Coolidge "ineloquent."

'Fess up, Mr. Goldberg! How many of Calvin Coolidge's speeches have you actually read? Admittedly, eloquence can be a matter of personal taste, but I invite my readers to consider the following passage from President Coolidge's 1925 inaugural address, and to draw their own conclusions about "Silent Cal's" rhetorical ability:

"I favor the principle of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form."

Maybe it's not the Gettysburg Address, but it's hardly ineloquent. I wish Old Cal would come back and give that same message to the spendthrift Republicans of today.

The quotation from President Coolidge's 1925 inaugural address that I cited in my last posting may be found in an intriguing little book called, The Quotable Calvin Coolidge, compiled and edited by veteran Washington PR consultant Peter Hannaford (Images from the Past, Bennington, VT, 2001).

The book is an eye-opener for anyone who has dismissed our 30th president as a man of few words and fewer brains. He is worthy of more serious attention than is usually accorded him, as this next quotation attests. It's from a speech he gave in 1921 when he was still Vice President, but it has an eerily topical ring:

"The trial the civilization of America is to meet does not lie in adversity. It lies in prosperity. It will not be in a lack of power, but in the purpose directing the use of great power. There is new danger in our very greatness.... It is impossible to overlook our imperfections. The war has greatly diminished the substance of some and greatly increased the substance of many. It has already given a new tongue to envy. Without doubt it will give a new grasp to greed."

This was a warning that the America of the Roaring 20s ignored, and the result was the crash of 1929.

February 27, 2006 is the 146th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech in New York City.

It was the speech which, according to Harold Holzer, in his excellent book, Lincoln at Cooper Union, made Lincoln President.

Just two years before, Lincoln had run for Senator from Illinois. Notwithstanding his credible showing in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he had been defeated. Had his speech at Cooper Union failed to impress, he would probably be a footnote in the history books today.

But the speech succeeded phenomenally, and the momentum propelled Lincoln to the Republican nomination and the White House.

Yet if the speech is so important, why is it so little known? According to Holzer, it is because the speech is the longest, most legalistic, and least poetic of Lincoln’s major speeches. In this he is correct. But it is nonetheless fascinating to see Lincoln at work as a lawyer, an orator and a rising and ambitious politician.

The gist of the speech was this: The Democrats insisted that the federal government had no power to exclude slavery from the territories. The Republicans said that it did.

The Democrats said that theirs was the position of the men who wrote the Constitution. That, they insisted, made them the conservatives, and made the Republicans radical innovators.

Lincoln’s reply to this argument was lawyerly, but masterful. He pointed to the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution who had expressed themselves on the slavery issue, and then pointed to a series of incontrovertible instances where the majority of these same men had upheld the right of the federal government to exclude slavery from the territories. Then came the kicker:

“But you say that you are conservative – eminently conservative – while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and the untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;’ while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.”

Lincoln did not say that emancipation was within the power of the federal government. He didn’t have to. The pro- and anti-slavery factions both grasped instinctively that excluding slavery from the territories was the first step in a process that could end only in the abolition of slavery itself.

It was this recognition that made civil war inevitable the moment that Lincoln won the White House.