Both have understood that the GOP can’t sit back and wait for the president’s miserable performance to bring him down all by itself. A candidate must define his opponent’s failure, then use that as a springboard to defining an alternative.

Everyone is saying that the long contest has been bad for the GOP. But none of the candidates had shaped and internalized these messages event four weeks ago. So in this long march something may have been lost, but something has also been gained.

But let me get this straight:

1) banks will be punished (do I understand this right, by a committee headed by Eric Holder?) if their lending is too risky,

2) and they will be required (by another special committee, I believe) to give more home loans (meaning to people who would otherwise not qualify for the loans, or else the government would not have to be involved) at lower rates (which means rates that do not compensate them as much as the market says they need to be compensated for the risks they are taking, all of which sounds like a new edition of the policies that brought on the financial collapse),

3) which must mean that they will have to pull back on risky lending someplace other than homes,

4) the only place that most banks would be able to pull back on riskier customers would be loans to small and new businesses,

5) but these are the businesses that have created just about all the jobs over the last 20 years and he said early in the speech he wants to encourage them,

6) so maybe their growth capital will come from selling stock to the kinds of people who invest in new and small businesses,

7) but through the Buffet Rule he’s going to double the tax rate on investment income for those people, meaning that, like the banks, they can’t be fully compensated for the risk of backing small and new businesses,

8. so they will not invest more in small and new companies but in big established firms,

9) so more of those small and new firms will have to turn to the government for capital,

10) which luckily he said would up its investing in early stage businesses with “the best” ideas,

11) “the best” ideas meaning, I guess, as with Solyndra, ideas that advance his agenda through companies whose owners support his candidacy),

12) or maybe it would be companies that agree to invite unionization (since the unions have failed to organize the new and dynamic sectors of the economy, which is why they have been shrinking),

13) but then with the big businesses, he wants to punish American companies if they invest overseas,

14) and he wants to increase exports,

15) but being competitive in the global markets often means having part of your production near your markets, which is why many companies have opened production facilities abroad and many foreign companies (BMW and Honda, for example) have opened their facilities here,

16) so he’ll make these companies less competitive, meaning less able to export anything that might be paired with some other product the company makes abroad in order to attract buyers,

17) and it also means he’ll have the U.S. ignoring many of the international trading rules of which we have been the principal sponsor since the end of WWII, rules that have led to an incredible growth in widely shared wealth all over the planet,

18) which means that, if he follows through, he’ll blow up the post-WWII global economic system,

19) which in the very short run may help the uncompetitive American labor unions but in the not-so-long run would devastate every economy on earth,

20) but it would also mean he would be in a position to decide where big companies could invest, and when, just as he’ll be in control of all new and small businesses, too.

I believe that’s what I heard the president advocate tonight. Am I wrong?

All the candidates were very strong, the best debating ensemble ever in a presidential campaign. But Gingrich turned the race around with the passion, imagination, cogency and inspiration of his Monday performance. He demonstrated the impact of great rhetoric. And he did it in a field that, at least in debate, is extraordinary.

I take an interest in presidential speech giving. I wrote speeches in the White House for nearly two-thirds of the Reagan presidency, the first half of that time for the Vice President, second half for the President.

Presidential rhetoric is an instrument of presidential power and an aspect of presidential duty. Particularly when putting the prestige of the nation on the line, any president –every president — must convey clarity about the mission, confidence in his decision, faith in the nation’s purpose and its leadership in the world, prudence in pursuing national interest, perspective about the historical framework of the action, and determination about seeing things through.

These are not just matters of political posturing and the personal interests of the man in the office himself. These are matters of leadership that only the man in the Oval Office can provide. They are matters of his duty to the American people who elected him and the office he occupies. They are part of what every president swears to when he raises his hand on Inauguration Day and pledges to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

By these measures, the last few weeks have been among the worst for presidential rhetoric on record. In the last seven days alone, how many times have we heard cries from both Left and Right that there is no clarity about the goal of our mission in Libya? How much confidence has been conveyed in contradictory statements about the participation of the U.S., whether we are involved or not involved or sort of involved?

It began before

Libya. How much leadership was there when one member of the administration said Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was not a dictator and should not step down, only for others in the administration to do an about face a few days later? Yes, I know that Joseph Biden is the vice president, not the president, but he was speaking for the White House. Presidential rhetoric sometimes extends beyond the words of the top man himself.

And yes, I know that the situation in Egypt was changing rapidly and difficult to discern, as it has been everywhere in the Middle East during this period. But Milton’s reflection on his blindness can sometimes apply to presidential rhetoric, particularly when events and intelligence reports leave you close to blind: “They also serve who stand and wait.” A sense of nuance, of framing statement to say enough but not too much, of restraint is also part of the task and art of the job.

In talking about leadership, I am not criticizing the supposed lead role of the British and the French in Libya, or the overall generalship of a Canadian in the operation. If those countries are ready to pitch in, that is all for the good. We are carrying a lot of packs in the Middle East and globally. If other western democracies can assume more cost and lift a greater share of the weight, by all means let them.

But it is essential to keep in mind that resources are not the only reason for American global leadership. More than any other nation, we are inclined by temperament, history, national governance, and tradition to step back and look at the good of the whole. The term honest broker is used too much in national and global affairs, but it is nevertheless true that the U.S. is the world’s only reliably honest broker. A president who coveys confidence in the place of the U.S. in the world helps preserve that role – a role essential to long run world peace.

The current president has not, to put it mildly, conveyed great assurance about U.S. global leadership. And in the past few weeks, as that leadership has been needed, his statements have done nothing to recover from that lapse or reclaim that sense of assurance.

Nor has he in his presidency displayed much historical awareness. For example, going back more than a year, his remark in Normandy on the sixty-fifth anniversary of D-Day, left at least this listener with a sense that he and his staff barely understood what had happened six and a half decades before or how much a duty the legacy of those event placed on all Americans who followed.

So tonight’s talk is an opportunity to start setting the current president’s rhetorical house in order. In the past several months in particular, but from early in the term as well, that house has been a mess and getting messier.

It is time for a little spring cleaning.

Well, #1) the buddy system seating — Ds mixed with Rs — apparently kept the Ds from getting up a wave. They were too dispersed. So the applause was too. It often sounded as though only one or two would start, then look around, see no one with them, and stop in embarrassment. But besides staging, why?

#2) With the exception of medical liability reform, on specifics Mr. Obama seemed still to be using soft words to conceal unyielding positions, as in, let’s freeze the budget immediately after I spend another trillion on toys for prep school boys like clean energy and high speed rail and everything else I can think of. This bate and switch act is old.

How about Congressman Paul Ryan’s reply?

Ryan is a better man than his speech, which was wrong for the occasion. Compared to the epic poem that is the SOU itself, the reply is an op-ed: short, fast, to the point. So like an op-ed, the reply needs to focus in on one specific and build its point.

To my knowledge, only one reply has ever upstaged a presidential speech to a joint session of Congress, and that was Senator Robert Dole’s to Clinton on Hillarycare. And Dole did it with a graphic, a chart showing the bureaucracy the bill would build.

Here’s the upshot: Ryan tried too hard to tell us deep truths we already knew; the president did the opposite.

Disappointing night.

The president announced that combat operations are over — but 50,000 troops (all combat trained, commentators said) are remaining, including 5,000 special forces soldiers.

He implied that, in keeping a campaign promise, the withdrawal was a product of administration initiative — except that the schedule and other specifics of the withdrawal were negotiated by the Bush administration before it left office.

He said we were going to stay in Afghanistan and use the money we had been spending in Iraq to that struggle — although we would begin pulling out next year.

“Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Emerson famously wrote. But how about foolish inconsistency? I am not a supporter of the president, but I like to see the game played well. Last night it was as if a rookie took the mound, and I’m not talking about Stephen Strasburg

The SEC’s civil suit against Goldman charges that, through a partner company, the investment bankers packaged particularly troubled mortgages into collateralized debt obligations, the now notorious CDOs. After Goldman sold the allegedly designed-to-fail instruments, the partner shorted them. Goldman collected fees for assembling and marketing the package (later offset, the firm contends, by larger losses). The partner reportedly netted a billion dollars on its short positions.

The Wall Street Journal front page story characterized the SEC’s charges as the biggest Wall Street-Washington confrontation since the Michael Milken-Drexel case at the end of the 1980s. The Journal might have added that Milken’s was the most prominent of a larger package of investigations targeting the investment community. Despite a parade of so-called perp-walks, when financiers were led into custody as cameras clicked, almost none of those actions produced convictions. The Milken case led to a fine and prison time but remains controversial to this day. Many, myself included, believe justice was miscarried.

Major financial players face a formidable communications obstacle when they become the targets of such sweeping legal actions. Most attorneys — both prosecutors and their own defense attorneys — and journalists don’t actually understand what they do. The complexity of modern fiance bewilders them. And they are predisposed to assume that complexity equals opacity and opacity equals fraud of one stripe or another.

I am not passing judgment on the government’s case against Goldman here, though the purchasers of the CDO were among the most experienced and sophisticated players in the financial world. If any buyers were capable of being intelligently beware, it was they. But I am saying that Goldman must learn to explain its business with unprecedented clarity, otherwise, the legal, political, and journalistic worlds will judge them guilty and exact huge penalties long before any trial.

Morgan’s glass pockets suggested passive transparency. Pull back the fabric; let in the light. Goldman will need actively to project the light outward, making the complex both simple and comprehensible. For an institution unaccustomed to talking to non-experts, the challenge is sure to prove formidable.