Nothing like a State of the Union speech for political commentators to dissect down to the bone. Or would a more apt analogy be reading tea leaves? Last night’s speech by President Bush was no exception, with seemingly every possible angle covered by the broadcast and cable news channels and online and print journalists of all stripes.

Looking for an original angle of my own, I talked with a few PR agency executives in Washington and found no one to be particularly enthused about the speech, though some had kinder words to say than others. One Democrat-leaning exec said that he thought the president seemed unenergetic and without emotion except at the end when he spoke about terrorism and the war in Iraq, which he might better have led with and used to set an urgent tone for his agenda.

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