It wasn’t just the awkward use of his hands, the hackneyed and inappropriate wartime metaphors, the equally banal “if we could land a man on the moon” drivel. All that was bad enough, but more devastating was the gulf between obvious fact and the speech’s fiction. These — shall we call them misspeakings — were coupled with more of the administration’s increasingly off-putting crisis default setting: That everything bad was Bush’s fault. Our son was two when we stopped accepting that kind of excuse in our house. This administration is almost two, but it’s been talking for longer than our son when we told him to stop the excuses.

Here is a list of questions that occurred to me during the speech and that even the most junior White House speechwriters should have seen as implicit in the text and hit the delete button:

* The speech suggested that the Administration was on top of the oil-spill situation from day one, with the Energy Secretary (co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”) heading the effort to trap oil gushing from the Gulf floor and floating toward our southern shores. Doesn’t that mean that hundreds of elected officials in the states involved, thousands of journalists, and millions of Americans failed to notice this all out effort until last night?

* The speech started by saluting our “brave men and women in uniform” who are “taking the fight to al Qaeda”. But part of that fight is diverting American oil dollars from the Middle East so they can’t fuel terrorism. In shutting down deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, hasn’t the White House gone AWOL in that part of the battle?

* The speech outlined a course of action that sets aside current laws for dealing with oil spills. Some may say that this emergency is too big to worry about the law, but out of curiosity, what is the White House’s legal authority for demanding that BP put money into an independent escrow account controlled by the government, and insisting that BP pay the wages of those affected by the White House ordered shutdown of deepwater drilling? Other than making the administration look in charge, why was the carefully crafted oil spill law (developed after the wreck of the Exxon Valdez) simply ignored in the week prior to the address in favor of huffing and puffing and threats of boots on the neck and kicked rear ends?

* The speech said that “we are running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water… [a]nd that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean.” Aren’t there hundreds, even thousands, of such sites, but few, if any, for which the U.S. government is willing to issue permits? Wasn’t the speech’s message that the government is going to stick to, not change, that status quo?

* The speech talked about “costs associated with the transition” away from dependence on foreign oil and decried those who say we can’t afford those costs. By halting deep water drilling and pushing all liability onto the oil company involved wasn’t the speech saying that the government would pay no price and bear no burden — even those costs and burdens that its regulations and ineptness impose — to achieve energy independence?

* And to repeat, the speech employed the metaphor of war throughout. In what way is cleaning up a lot of oil like a war, unless the speechwriter intended to suggest KP duty? Is not our real war against global forces that are funded in large part via Middle Eastern money, money that comes from the oil trade? Isn’t using the accident as an excuse for policies that will push drilling out of the United States a form of surrender in that war, the real war?

Here is a lesson I learned writing speeches in the Reagan White House: Public communications is a highly sensitive, delicate thing. If the logic of your text is not tight, if you deviate even slightly from what your audience knows to be true, if in making your case you seem to look down on your audience and try to play slight of hand with their concerns, you are dead in the water.

Last Tuesday night, President Obama was dead in the water.

Add to that list: Applying to pre-school.

Like lots of cities these days, parents can choose to start sending their children to “school” as early as 18-months. (Good framing by the way!) My older daughter is approaching 3, and this past fall I started the “process” of applying to pre-school.

And a process it is. Parent visits, lengthy applications, fees, play dates, and the spring delivery of – yes! – thick and thin envelopes.

After a lot of hard work my husband and I were pleased that our daughter was accepted to her (I mean, our) first choice.  And while I suspect it was largely fortuitous – I can’t imagine any of the applicants were unfit for finger painting and circle time – I think it’s fair to say her acceptance had something to do with my work in communications.  Or, if it didn’t, I certainly learned a lot about good communications from the process.

The fact is pre-schools are inundated with applications from eager parents. But they can’t take all of them, and short of a boxing ring, it might actually come down to your message.  How are you going to make your toddler stand out? What’s going to make your application different than the next?

It isn’t health care legislation or tax reform, but a pre-school application is a lot like a speech or op-ed. The first step is determining what you want to say.  And sometimes – like when it’s your child – there are many, many points to be made. (I know I could go on for pages about all my daughter’s wonderful traits. But let’s be honest, so could all the parents.)  It’s important to choose one or two points that really capture your message, or child.

This is where the age-old adage “show don’t tell” came in very handy.  Instead of listing all our daughter’s wonderful qualities, we tried to show her to them. We wrote about the things that interest her, what she enjoys doing, what activities she’s engaged in, what questions she asks, who her friends are – in short we gave them a portrait of her personality, not a litany of her best tricks.

And like a speech, it’s important to draw your audience in right away.  A good speaker might start with something personal – a story, a joke – and the same is necessary with an application.  So instead of the stale, typical head shot  most people attach to their applications, we sent in a picture of our daughter lying in the middle of a pile of leaves with a smile on her face a mile wide – who wouldn’t want to read the rest of the application after seeing that?

In communications, we have to think a lot about our audience, what we’re saying, and how we’re saying it.  And while a pre-school application isn’t exactly competing for airtime or column inches, it’s still necessary to find a creative way to make your voice heard.

And just remember, it’s only pre-school – you can always apply again next year!

Hard to imagine, considering invitations are sent by email, responded to by text message, and directions can be accessed by phone. Miscommunication about a date seems, well, a little out-of-date.

But, that’s exactly what happened to French peasants in the 16th century, and today we have April Fool’s Day to commemorate their foolishness.  While it’s hard to pinpoint the very first April Fool’s Day, experts look to 1582 as the origin.  That’s the year Pope Gregory XIII replaced the Julian calendar with the Gregorian calendar.  Since the Pope’s authority did not extend beyond the Papal States and the Catholic Church, it was up to individual countries to adopt this reformed calendar on their own time.

Charles IX of France was one of the first to introduce the Gregorian calendar, in which the New Year was moved to January 1st.  Under the Julian calendar, the New Year was celebrated for eight days beginning March 25th, culminating on April 1st.  But in the days before wifi, iPhones, Blackberrys, and viral videos changes to the calendar had to be communicated by word-of-mouth – a much slower means of communicating.

For many people – especially peasants in the countryside – word of the date change did not arrive for several years. And even then, some refused to accept the reformed calendar and continued celebrating the New Year on April 1st.

The more sophisticated among French society laughed at these “fools” who continued to show up to the party on the wrong day.  And a tradition of ridicule and practical jokes sprung up around the uninformed.

In today’s world of rapidly changing telecommunications, even a fool can get the date right.  But rapid-fire technology doesn’t make it easier to get the message right.

While most of these historical phrases denote grand domestic programs, President Bush’s “War on Terror” identified a new foreign policy in which the country was at war with a radical ideology rather than a state.

President Obama has settled on “New Foundation” – a phrase he first used in his inaugural address – to brand his approach to everything from education to health care to financial security.

But as linguist Geoff Nunberg makes clear, a brand is only as important as what it represents.  The “Great Society” is significant in our lexicon because of the sweeping legislative reforms it stands for and the way it fundamentally transformed the relationship of the American public to their government.  Had it been called the “Even Greater New Deal,” we would still be talking about it today.

As WHWG’s managing director Clark Judge wrote earlier this year, “There is nothing magical about crafting language that is memorable.  The trick is having ideas and arguments that are worth remembering.”

That will be the real test for “New Foundation:” the content and impact of the President’s policies.

Posted weekly, the program usually features Roberts interviewing a distinguished economic thinker.  On February 8th, Roberts broke from this format to discuss his own thinking about why trade is good.  Drawing on Adam Smith and David Ricardo, 18th and 19th century respectively giants of economic thought, he explored how trade increases personal productivity by a factor of a hundred and more.  As he summed up, “Self-sufficiency [in a person, a tribe, or a country] equals poverty.”

While listening, I found myself thinking of the campaign against Wal-Mart, which is essentially a campaign against productivity and global trade.  Wal-Mart’s enormous price advantages are based on harnessing the interplay of enormous global sourcing of product and advanced information technology to lower costs and, with costs, prices.  This is the dynamic the Roberts explains in his podcast.

Why am I talking about economics and a retailer on a communications website?  Because Wal-Mart is running an ad campaign that conveys precisely the same ideas as does Professor Roberts, but in the compact, anecdotal, and personal language of advertising.  Its slogan — “Save Money. Live Better” — condenses Smith, Ricardo, and Roberts into four words.

When writing for Ronald Reagan, I noticed that the President did something very similar.  He would sketch out the thinking of Adam Smith or Alexis d’ Toqueville or some other major thinker.  But he would rarely refer to the thinker by name.  Like Wal-Mart, he framed his discussion in compact, anecdotal, and personal terms.  Listening to him, you felt you had heard something very simple, when in fact you had heard an argument of high sophistication.

Companies facing the kind of agenda-driven challenge that Wal-Mart faces would do well to look at both the retailer and the former president as examples of how to communicate.

It looks simple.  It isn’t.

At least that was the case in 1957 – two weeks after the Little Rock Nine were barred from Central High School – when Louis Armstrong gave one of his most notable performances.  But this wasn’t a musical riff.

According to a recent interview on National Public Radio, Larry Lubenow, a journalism student working at The Grand Forks Herald in Little Rock, AK, was sent to interview Armstrong about a concert.  Instead he got an (obscene) earful about politics and race relations that ultimately caught the attention of President Eisenhower.

As The Chicago Defender reported at the time, “Any white confused by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s polite talk need only listen to Mr. Armstrong.”  His words, they wrote, had the “explosive effect of an H-bomb.”

In communications, we have to think about not only what we’re saying, but also the way we say it.  We all know Louis Armstrong had a talent for striking the right note, so perhaps it’s no surprise he used his talent to effect political change.

At a time when people are bombarded by verbiage in myriad forms – email, Facebook, Twitter – we have to find creative ways to break through the noise.  And sometimes something a little off-key is just what we need.

As Yogi Berra once said, if you don’t know where you are going, chances are you won’t get there. One of the ways to determine where exactly you want to get with a speech is to work backwards, from the results you want to achieve. It sometimes helps to ask yourself (or more likely, ask the person who will be giving the speech) if a reporter were writing a news story about the speech, what would you want the lead to be about? What would you want the news headline to say? (It sometimes helps to write two or three alternative headlines to drive the decision-making process.)

Concentrating on the specific results you want is the first step to writing a speech that will get the message across.