SOTU Wrap-up

We will be posting a few post-mortems on the State of the Union from speech pros throughout the day and encourage you to check them out to get a range of views on the president's performance. But in the meantime, here are a few odds and ends observations to share with our fellow speech geeks.

• Did you notice something missing in the TV commentary? No speechwriters, at least as we could tell. Early yesterday afternoon a friend sent us a list of all the analysts who were to be pundicating on the major networks before and after the SOTU, and there was not one speechwriting pro among them. Now, we can certainly understand wanting to feature known commentators and strategists. But it seems kind of strange to go completely without the relevant expert perspective that comes from crafting political speeches for a living (let alone knowing the challenges that go into writing a State of the Union address).

• What's a major political event these days without some kind of meta melodrama?  In the case of last night's SOTU, insiders were all atwitter (and a-Twitter) about the leaking of the full speech text to National Journal a few hours before the president began to address the chamber. The White House was apparently furious at the pre-emption. But in this perpetually wired day and age, should anyone be surprised that this happened, or for that matter, think it's worthy of a Beltway meltdown?