Tales from the Trail

The one word that leaped out of President Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress wasn’t “optimism,” “business,” “teachers,” “economy” or “budget.”

To those who listened to the speech on National Public Radio, the memorable term was “salmon,” writ large in a word cloud NPR compiled from its listeners after Obama finished.

That kind of makes sense. Without the Punch-and-Judy theater of Republicans and Democrats popping up from their seats to cheer or boo, as they customarily do when they’re seated on opposing sides of the room for a presidential address, it was up to the Commander in Chief to deliver some chuckle-worthy lines.

Obama got his biggest laugh for this rather understated poke at overlapping federal bureaucracies:

“There are 12 different agencies that deal with exports. There are at least five different agencies that deal with housing policy. Then there’s my favorite example: the Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in saltwater. (Laughter.) I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked. (Laughter and applause.)”

The process intricacies that go into lawmaking can stump the hardiest of congressional watchers.

Now that Democrats may decide to use reconciliation to get healthcare legislation passed in Congress, everyone has been scrambling for the easiest possible explanation.

What we found were lots of words and several reports aimed at explaining the process that everyone’s talking about, but no one-line, easy-to-understand, explain-it-to-your-grandmother, definition.

Legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, the former analyst who released the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, offered some well-timed advice Sunday when he appeared on NPR’s On the Media. In an interview with host Brooke Gladstone, he urged government insiders to leak information about a potential build-up of U.S. troops in Afghanistan:

“There are a lot of people looking at estimates that are being withheld from the public … They should ask themselves, did my oath to uphold and support the Constitution really permit me to keep quiet when I see the public being lied to?

“I’m sure there are many people in the Pentagon and the CIA and the White House who are in my shoes right now. My advice to them is, don’t do what I did, don’t reveal it six years from now, don’t wait till the escalation has occurred. Instead, they should do what I wish I had done in 1965, which is to the tell the public what I believed right then: That my president was making a terrible mistake, that Congress should hold hearings, Congress should demand the truth and Congress should set him straight.”