DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

A few years ago I attended a party in Reno where I encountered an acquaintance, a vintage car restorer. Apparently because I was then in television journalism, he chose to unload his dislike of the practice of post-speech analysis.

"It really gets me when the media people come on after a president's speech to tell us what he just said!" he told me.

I tried to explain the practice, but he was irate and wasn't having any.

The truth is that when we do post-speech analysis it is very rarely to repeat "what he just said." It is to report what he did NOT say.

Why is this necessary? Because chief executives have a practice of putting a positive spin on the things they talk about. And this involves deception not by commission but by omission. For instance, during his first years in office as Nevada governor, Richard Bryan kept threatening Nevada hospitals with a rate setting commission. Then in one of his biennial messages to the Nevada Legislature, he didn't even mention the idea, instead proposing a much less severe procedure for dealing with health care costs. Bryan didn't mention his change of position (and his aides tried to claim he hadn't changed his position), so while he was speaking I phoned my television station and arranged for a section of his previous message to the legislature to be excerpted for me. In that excerpt, he told the hospitals to do something about health care costs "or else face" rate setting. During my analysis after the speech I had the tape played and contrasted it with his new position so the public would know that Bryan had abandoned one of his most popular stances.

I often wish that instead of playing a governor's speech, we would tape it and then broadcast it a night later after adding crawls across the bottom of the television screen providing the information the governor is withholding. Remember that scene in "Annie Hall," in which Diane Keaton and Woody Allen make small talk while captions tell the viewer what their words really mean? Something like that.

For instance, Gov. Jim Gibbons' speech to the Nevada Legislature last week set some kind of record for disingenuousness. Imagine him on television with explanatory crawls across the bottom of the screen while he spoke.

Gibbons: "The budget that I submit today ... is $2.2 billion smaller than the one we submitted just two years ago."

Caption: Actually, Gibbons' 2009 budget recommendations are $700 million smaller than two years ago.

Gibbons: "Likewise, I will not unfairly balance this budget on the backs of those in our society who can least afford to shoulder the burden, either."

Caption: Gibbons asked lawmakers for authority close the state's preventive child health care program to more than two thirds of those eligible. And Gibbons asked the legislature to lower state worker pay by 6 percent and shift a quarter of their health insurance cost onto the workers, a regressive arrangement that means the least senior and lowest paid state workers will pay 13 percent and those at the top pay only 6 percent.

Gibbons: "Our existing tax system brought us record job growth and prosperity for decades."

Caption: The Nevada tax system underwent fundamental changes in 1977 and 1981. If a tax system has an impact on prosperity, it is noteworthy that the income of Nevadans in comparison to the national median income has declined steadily in that same period. And in those three decades, the state has experienced four crippling budget crises.

Wouldn't that make speeches more fun, and more informative?